Splash Day

Tall Tale

Our newest nature challenge is to find and identify a tree on our campus. 

The trick: Each group must find and identify a tree different from the other groups' trees.

They then began to develop a Field Guide page for their group's tree.

The children measured the circumference of their tree in centimeters.

They illustrated and measured the length of the leaf.

 

They noted the tree's habitat (forest, desert, grassland, tundra, freshwater, saltwater, etc.) and its location on our campus.  They wrote a physical description of the tree.  They also looked for evidence of how the tree reproduces.

There's a Book for That!

Texas Trees & Wildflowers (Pocket Naturalist)

Trees of Southeast Texas (waterproof pocket guide)

Trees of Texas: An Easy Guide to Leaf Identification by Carmine Stahl & Ria McElvaney
Field Guide to Trees of North America (National Wildlife Federation)

Crinkleroot's Guide to Knowing the Trees by Jim Arnosky
Tree Finder by May Theilgaard Watts

Resources:

Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature by Jon Young, Ellen Haas, and Evan McGown

Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv

Houston Arboretum & Nature Center

Mercer Arboretum & Botanic Gardens

Jesse Jones Park & Nature Center

Pesto, Change-o

Mrs. T's class invited us to bask in their basil bounty! 

We went over to their classroom to whip up a little pesto. 

This recipe calls for pine nuts, which are better but also more expensive. We used walnuts.

A kind parent volunteer boiled a huge batch of pasta, and each child had a taste of pesto pasta.  Yumm! 

I love the idea of helping children restore the connection between garden and food.  In college, I attended a course called Sustainable Agriculture, taught by environmentalist David Orr.  We read Rooted in the Land and visited an Amish farmer who talked about the importance of place and the benefits of small-scale family farming.  That course got me thinking more consciously about the divide our culture has developed between food and its source.  Recently, I've been thinking and learning (and excited) about these ideas again.

It is interesting the way--when you're paying attention--events and resources sometimes seem to conspire to push in the same direction.  At the 2010 American Montessori Society annual conference in Boston, I attended a fabulous workshop on practical life in the elementary classroom.  The presenter talked about a class with a wonderful snack program in which the children do the planning, the budgeting, the shopping, and then, for example, make yogurt and assemble fresh fruit yogurt parfaits for all.  A few weeks later, due to a cold, rainy day (for the first time in its history), I spent a good bit of my time at the Annual Herbal Forum at Round Top in the cozy (and dry) make-shift book shop. It was there that I stumbled upon Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea by Alice Waters. The photographs alone made me salivate, and the philosophy is perfectly in line with Montessori practical life activities for older children. With sledgehammer-like subtlety, I hinted to my mother that it would make a good birthday present. She dutifully complied.

Although I can't remember where, I had heard about the Edible Schoolyard several years ago. Alice Waters is the chef/owner of Chez Panisse and one of the founding chefs behind the eat-local, slow-food movement, but she is also a former Montessori teacher. The book got me poking around on the Edible Schoolyard website. Their blog makes me swoon!  In a fit of book lust, I ordered up The Garden Companion: Inside the Edible Schoolyard Classroom and The Kitchen Companion. 

Soon after, a friend (and fellow Montessori teacher) who raises chickens and I had a conversation about her slight reluctance to eat the eggs from her backyard chickens.  We've become so disconnected from our food sources that we sometimes feel a little uncomfortable at first when this natural connection is restored, when you know the chicken who laid the egg and when you're in more direct contact with the anatomy of egg-laying.  We made a date to see an outdoor screening of "What's on Your Plate?" at the Houston Arboretum (part of a series of films examining our food supply).  The documentary follows two eleven-year-old urban students as they explore food production and their place in the food chain.  Another friend who joined us for the movie told me about Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution.  He's not off the mark when he talks about what's happened to our relationship with food. 

For many of us, our food is purchased in grocery stores after being trucked across the country (or flown around the world), processed, and wrapped in plastic.  Mostly, we don't ever see where our food comes from and we don't meet the people who grow it and prepare it.  The connection between the cow in the pasture and the refrigerated, plastic-wrapped ground meat in the grocery is not obvious.  It's even less obvious in the form of a Lunchable.  For some who live in our poorest inner-city neighborhoods, there is no access to grocery stores.  Instead, families are forced to buy their "meals" at convenience stores and fast food restaurants.  

It's not all bad news, and exciting things are happening right here in Houston.  With the same ideas about healthy eating and restoring the seed-to-table connection, Gracie Cavnar launched Houston's Recipe for Success Foundation in 2005.  Monica Pope, local chef of Tafia, hosts the Midtown Farmers Market and offers a free cooking class every Saturday to teach folks about preparing foods that are in season and grown locally.  There's another farmers market at Rice University on Tuesday evenings.  Urban Harvest helps initiate school and community gardens and organizes farmers markets on Saturdays at Eastside and on Sundays at Discovery Green.  Check out what's growing now, and cook up some locally grown food!  Or better yet, start your own garden at home!  Not only are cooking and growing food great practical life activities for children, gardening is another great way for children to get children outside and rekindle an appreciation for relationships between plants and animals in the natural world.


Resources:
Come to the Table inspirational video by former middle school student Zoë Salnave
Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea by Alice Waters (now chef and former Montessori teacher!)
The Garden Companion: Inside the Edible Schoolyard Classroom
The Kitchen Companion: Inside the Edible Schoolyard Classroom
Recipe for Success
Walking the World in Wonder: A Children's Herbal by Ellen Evert Hopman
"An Interview with Alice Waters" in Montessori Life
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver

A Tale of Two Trees

Confession time.  After the children correctly identified those bright green spiky balls as fruits of the Sweet Gum Tree, this was my Story of the Day.

A little background: When I presented the children with the mystery spiky green balls, the children began to make connections to their own experiences.  K____ said she had seen them at her grandmother's house under a tree, only they were bigger and brown.  "We pick them up and throw them in the lake," she said, struggling to remember the name of the tree.  "A gum tree?"  C_____ said she had seen them on the way home from school.  A few children quickly consulted field guides, and, along with drawing upon their own experiences, began to draw conclusions.   "Oh, I know!  It's a Sweet Gum!" 

I pushed them to think about the evidence they would need to be sure that their hypothesis was correct.  They asked me wonderful questions about my find.  "Where did you find those balls?  Were they still attached to the plant or on the ground?"  "Were they under a tree?"  "What is the shape of the leaf?"  "How big can the balls get?"  "Do they hang from a leaf or on a branch?  Or is it the leaf?"   "How many of those can grow on a tree?"  "Do they grow out of the ground near the tree?"  "Did you find them here at school?"    And finally, "Will you bring us some leaves from the tree where you found the balls?"

I promised I would and then dutifully pulled some leaves from the tree on the return portion of my walking route.  I tucked them into the pocket of my teacher bag and brought them to school the next day, but testing intervened and I didn't have an opportunity to show them to the children.  That evening I was sitting on a friend's back deck, gazing up at her tree--a Sweet Gum, a tree with those very same bright green spiky balls hanging from the branches.  Hmm.  All of the leaves I pulled from the tree on my walking path had only three lobes, but every leaf on my friend's Sweet Gum had five lobes.  Weird!

On my next walk, I looked more carefully.  Yep.  Those spiky balls, both green and brown, are definitely Sweet Gum fruits . . . but are there any attached to the tree with the three-lobed leaves?  Nope!  After standing there, hands on hips, staring up at that tree (looking--to anyone peeking fearfully from behind his/her curtains--for all the world like a person who has completely lost her marbles), I realized there is a second, much taller tree towering over the tree from which I took the sample three-lobed leaves.  And all of the leaves on the taller tree have the characteristic five lobes of a Sweet Gum!  Gravity being what it is, those spiky balls had fallen from higher than I gave them credit.  Lessons of the day: Be sure of your evidence.  Look carefully.  Don't jump to conclusions.  Admit when you've made a mistake.

Urban safari

The children spent every morning this week caged in their desks for Stanford testing, and we needed to get outside. 

Time for an Urban Safari!  


Inspired by my Fund for Teachers fellowship in southern Africa last summer, we took our field packs outside for a nature challenge. 

This week’s challenges: Each group must find a nest and identify a bird. 

From testing to nesting . . .

Some groups met both challenges with one find!

sparrow

Mourning dove

Grackle

Bonus challenge: Find an edible plant (be sure of your identification!) and then taste it.



Cooperative Investigation Teams then worked together to create field guide pages for the birds they found and identified.

Thank you to the birthday girl who brought trail mix--a perfect snack for field work!

There's a book for that!

Birds, Nests and Eggs (Take-Along Guide) by Mel Boring

Houston Birds (Pocket Naturalist)

Texas Wildlife (Pocket Naturalist)
Crinkleroot's Guide to Knowing the Birds by Jim Arnosky
Field Trips:  Bug Hunting, Animal Tracking, Bird Watching, Shore Walking by Jim Arnosky

Resources:
Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature by Jon Young, Ellen Haas, and Evan McGown
Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv
National Wildlife Federation Bird Behavior Hike
Houston Arboretum & Nature Center
Mercer Arboretum & Botanic Gardens birding field checklist
Jesse Jones Park & Nature Center

Rain, rain--come today

As a native Houstonian, I love a good thunderstorm!  Usually rain is a dependable reality at this time of year, but it's been a long time since we've had any rain at all.  Most of the south (those of us who are not being flooded or blown down by tornadoes) are experiencing serious drought.  Last night, I dreamt of rain.

Today, we brought a little rain into the classroom. 

It started out quiet and soft, with just a few drops [tongues clicking the roofs of our mouths and then fingers snapping].  Drip, drop . . . drip, drop.

The rain became steadier [rubbing our palms together--which the children pointed out creates friction and heat]

and heavier [patting our legs with hands, faster and faster].




 
 
 



 


Finally, it was a thunderstorm [feet stomping].

Then the storm slowly moved off just the way it had come.

Maybe . . . .

Paste Paper Bookmarks

I discovered the joys of paste paper at the Summer Book Arts Studio offered by the Museum of Printing History. You should have seen that little group of teachers happily creating beautiful messes!

 

 

The paste is made from powdered wallpaper paste (the big box hardware stores don't seem to carry this--check Ace Hardware or Sherwin Williams).  Mix the powder with warm water (I failed to do this the first time I mixed my own paste and was rewarded with many lumps).  Shake the powder and the water in a large glass or plastic jar with a lid (an old honey bottle with a squirt top works well) until it resembles a clear gel (think Aloe Vera gel).

Mix small amounts with a drop or two of acrylic paints of your choice, and you’re ready to add paste pizazz to your papers!  Use a popsicle stick, a sponge brush, or a paint brush to spread colored paste on a piece of paper (choose thick art paper or cardstock—paper that tolerates being wet). 

Gather a few combs and anything else that might make patterns in the paste and experiment!

Look at some of the lovely papers the children created!

After our papers had been dried and pressed, we set about the task of making bookmarks to honor and celebrate the special women in our lives.  We cut the papers into strips and selected just the right color construction paper to back them. 

A few children got creative with the scraps.  The one below was created especially for our principal.  "I chose green because it will remind Mrs. P of recycling."  (In addition to becoming a Montessori Magnet, our campus has an emphasis on Environmental Science.)

This one was created for our volunteer who listens to children read.

This summer, the Museum of Printing History is offering family sessions (along children's sessions and adult sessions) for the Summer Book Arts Studio!  What fun to spend part of the summer learning and creating together!