Our last watermelons.....sniff...

Today we shared our last watermelons with the whole school. The general verdict was "delicious", "juicy", "scrumptious", "yummy", "the best", "awsome" etc. etc.
We decided to save the seeds in order to plant them next Spring to see if we can repeat our success this year. We are aware that this will be an experiment as we don't know if these seeds will be true to its parent plant.
Our younger students have a fabulous concept of how the life cycle is continuous and they could explain planting, germinating, flowering, pollination, fruiting and then ....eating....and then it starts all over again!
We have saved seeds before from parsley, lettuce, rocket, broad beans, sunflowers etc. and hope to become more self sufficient in the future....another great way to become more sustainable.

Visitors to our school

Today we welcomed our local kindergarten students ( http://www.playbasedlearning.com.au/ ) to our school as part of our transition program. They brought with them many mini artworks which they placed in our Sensory Garden. As participants in an international arts inititiative called the Spore Project, the kindergarten students had constructed many beautiful mushrooms from paper bags. People from all around the world have constructed thousands of unique mushrooms from paper bags.

The SPORE Project was created by artist Doug Rhodehamel and is a worldwide effort developed to promote awareness for the support for art education and creativity in day-to-day life.

http://dougrhodehamel.wordpress.com/category/z2-spore/

We may be a little late joining the project, but we have been inspired by our kindergarten friends to participate. Stay posted to see our mushrooms. It will also be a great opportunity for our students to study how mushrooms grow and what a spore is.

What is a habitat?

Level 1 and 2 students today created a habitat in which a Garden Skink would survive. Many of our kids had talked about these gorgeous little creatures with some of them knowing about their ability to drop their tail when in danger. We talked about what kind of habitat would be best for a skink. Many knew about them being cold blooded and the way they bask on a rock in the sun to warm up. It was great to hear their conversations about food sources and shelter from weather and preditors as they were building. They loved this experience and enjoyed earning a little paper skink to pop into their lizard houses when their habitats passed the quality habitat test.

Disaster....then good news!!

What a disaster...our gorgeous black chook, Skittles was taken by a fox last Thursday. Many stories are circulating the playground about a fox beeing seen in the daytime. It is a reminder about our responsibility as Chook Farmers to make sure that any habitats we provide are safe as well as providing the necessities such as food and water.
We reflected again today in our Sustainable Futures lesson about habitats and what constitutes a healthy habitat. We talked about what happens if something is taken away from a habitat or is introduced to a habitat.
Level 3 students task today was to imagine that they have to create a place to keep an animal for a year. The animal will be in there without them or anyone else being able to be in contact with it. In their journals they drew and wrote about an ideal habitat for the animal they chose while being mindful of the necessary components of a habitat: food source, water, shelter from weather and preditors, a place to breed.
It was interesting when sharing our designed habitats at the end of the lesson, to discover how everything must be in balance in order for our "creature" to survive........a great opportunity to link to the situation with our attacked chook and our quest to attract frogs to our Frog Habitat.


This morning Leroy's grandpa arrived with two gorgeous chooks, one brown and one grey. Thankyou..... such great timing!



The grey one is quite unusual and we still haven't found out the breed. She has beautiful soft grey feathers and no comb or wattles. Can anyone tell us what she is?

Autumn in our school garden

Today we took advantage of the beautiful autumn weather with Level 4 harvesting our massive pumpkins and the rest of our watermelons. Our Garden Guardian lunch time club had lots of fun finding the last of our potatoes and digging over our pumpkin patch ready for more planting. Fotunately for our chook, many grubs were found in the process and delivered to her for a special treat!