Earth Day 2016: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Restore, Replenish

This week was filled with all sorts of Earth Day festivities--from growing our seedlings and planting seeds for our school garden to exploring and capturing the great outdoors. 

Our seedlings on Monday

Over the last two weeks, we've been growing our seedlings. They've made lots of growth already!

Our seedlings on Friday!

We've been continuing to write poems in Writer's Workshop, so we took the iPads outside to take some pictures that will inspire some of our poems when we return from vacation

On Friday, we had parent volunteers from the PTO visit our classroom. They helped us pick and plant seeds that will go into our school garden and we also got the chance to vote on the name of our new garden!

We also got a little crafty by using recycled tissue paper to create heart-shaped planets to show our love for our world

Lastly, we made one more ode to Earth Day by taking a quick hike on the trails in Stratham Hill Park. We took the trails all the way back to the pond by the base of the kill, where we got to see some handiwork done by the park's resident beavers! 

Happy Earth Day!

Bean Sprouts!

On Friday, we took one last look at our lima bean greenhouses before sending them home. While some are still taking a bit longer to grow, others have entered into the seedling stage with a tiny stem and leaves to boot! 

We took a closer look at many of our beans using our document camera, it was so cool to see them up close on the big projector screen! We talked about why some of the beans might not have grown as fast, and these were some of our thoughts:

• they didn't have enough air or water
• they had too much water
• maybe some beans are older and some are younger
• the way the paper towel was folded might have affected the amount of light getting to the bean

We hope many of the beans continue to grow at home! Beans with a lot of roots or a stem could be transplanted into a small cup with a hole for drainage and some soil that could be left on a sunny windowsill. Unfortunately, Ms. Riley's bean did indeed have too much water and instead of growing roots, it grew a bit of mold. Hopefully she has better  luck with the other plants in our classroom!! :) 

Germination Station!

Over the weekend, many of our beans reached full germination after they began to grow roots! We took a closer look at our beans under our document camera and drew diagrams of them in our science journals.