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!

Planting Party!

This week has been a planting party in 2R! Many of us had success growing our lima beans, and now we are going to try our hand with some new plants!

 At the beginning of the week, we studied the packets of seeds we were going to plant in order to learn about what we were planting and how to best help them grow. Once we took notes for each packet and discussed what we should do, we got to planting:

We will now be trying to grow spinach, rainbow blend chard, and pole beans!

Later in the week, we created mini greenhouses to grow some of our pole beans in. We each designed a greenhouse to hang in the window. We placed 2 bean seeds in a plastic bag with a damp paper towel and sealed the bag, which was then stapled to our greenhouse. Not only will the sealed bag water the seed for us, but we will also be able to see the roots grow through the plastic! Hopefully some of our seeds will germinate over the weekend :) 

We also placed some cosmos seeds in a slightly larger greenhouse to see how the plants were able to water themselves in the enclosed environment. We noticed water was collecting on the top of the plastic as it evaporated from the soil, and then it would condense and fall from the lid like rain!

In just a few short days, we were already beginning to see some growth :) We can't wait to see what all of our plants look like when we return to school on Monday!