What an inventive group of kids!

Our students love to use natural materials in our gardens to create cubbies, pathways, miniworlds, racetracks, etc. One day, when I was on yard duty, I noticed this group of very industrious kids working collaboratively to design and construct an obstacle course for our chooks.









These old tree rounds and others find themselves all around the school and they are used for many different purposes.

Look at the effort they are putting in. 

I think Storm liked her new obstacle course....... ;)

Float or sink??

Level 3 students have been learning about transport in their classroom. Part of their inquiry was to design, construct and test a floating form of transport using materials collected from our schoolgrounds. They were most successful at the testing part of the process.

Isn't learning fun when you can use real situations and materials and work with a team to solve a problem.

Well done Level 3 students and teachers!

Bulbs, bulbs and more bulbs..........

Now I really cannot wait until Spring........ Krystal and Ethan arrived with MORE bulbs today!! Serious bulb planting took place today in our gardens. Now we will enjoy flowers popping up in our Peace garden, Discovery garden, Flower garden, along our fenceline with more in our recycled (scrounged) boxes we had planted last year.We should have a tapestry of incredible colours amongst our plants when they flower.

More planting tomorrow........




Here our Level 1 and 2 students are adding bulbs to last year's box plantings. You can see that some of last year's bulbs are already coming up.

Our level 1 and 2 students made a colourful thank you letter/poster to show our appreciation for these gifts.

The kids took such care with drawing and cutting out their tiny flower pictures (copied from the bulb packets), showing great respect for the gift and the giver.
...I think I overdid it with the "beautifuls"...oops....

Ducks are on the pond.........

On Monday we had a surprise visit from two ducks who decided they would stay a while in our Frog Habitat pond.  Level 3 students watched quietly while these two visitors enjoyed a chilly morning swim in our pond. It's great to see our Frog Habitat being enjoyed by a variety of creatures........no frogs yet though ;(
Some students were fascinated with the ripples on the surface of the pond....makes you wonder if some kids ( and adults) don't spend  time just quietly observing some of the amazing little wonders of nature without the noise and rush of normal everyday life.

Lots to look forward to in a garden!

The consideration for many of our plantings in our garden have been to select drought tolerant and native plants. We also try to select plants with a few purposes. Fruit/shade trees, plants which smell great and we can also eat, bamboo that we can use for staking our plants, bush tucker plants and flowering plants for learning and bringing birds into the garden, plants that slow the movement of water across our garden to prevent flooded areas in our garden etc.

Two of our latest plant purchases are not natives but are trees which will particularly indicate seasonal change. One is a weeping cherry, another is a beautiful maple. Both have been planted in our Discovery Garden along with two gorgeous native flowering gums which will be a "food bar" to our bird population and will provide shade in this area too.

Every season will show changes in these wonderful trees which were purchased with prize money from last year's Victorian State Schools Garden Awards competition, one we enjoy entering each year.

Thanks to my long suffering husband Steve, who collected them and planted them with me this weekend.... what a great supporter of our school!

Look out for photos soon

Thanks to Krystal and Ethan..... Can't wait for Spring......

What a lovely surprise this week! Two of our students arrived proudly at my door bearing gifts of hundreds of bulbs for our garden. We had been lucky to be given some last year and we had planted them in our recycled (read "scrounged") wooden boxes which the kids had arranged in a maze like design on a plain asphalt area.We have noticed that these bulbs have already begun to pop out their little heads promising us a fabulous display again when Spring comes. We have used this planting for many lessons ......and it looked great too.

The bulbs that arrived this week totally changed what I had planned. We looked at what they were, how they developed into wonderful flowers, what they looked like (many said onions), their requirements and how we will use them.

We looked at sizes, grouping them from smallest to biggest in groups of four or five kids.The kids then decided how to group them.

The following pictures show how these inventive kids did it.......( I reckon they learnt a lot more about growing bulbs in the process...I was impressed and they found out the info themselves!)

Grouping ideas included: Smallest to biggest, longest shoot, time they took to grow, where they grow best, when they should be grown, colour groups, size of bulb, size of flower etc.

We will put these in this week...weather permitting! :) 

It's why we do what we do.......

“Without continuous hands-on experience, it is impossible for children to acquire a deep intuitive understanding of the natural world that is the foundation of sustainable development. ….A critical aspect of the present-day crisis in education is that children are becoming separated from daily experience of the natural world, especially in larger cities.”

Natural Learning, Creating Environments for Rediscovering Nature’s Way of Teaching, Robin C. Moore and Herb H. Wong

Tamsin loves the Earth!

Tamsin in Level 2 brought this to school today. She had made it at home in response to an earlier lesson about how we can make a difference to the health of our planet. I think she will!!!!

What does it take to be an insect?

Level 1 and 2 have been looking at arthropods and today we focussed on insects and their features. We identified three body parts, three pairs of legs and antennae as the basic features of an insect. In pairs, students designed their own insect, considering how it eats, moves, finds its food, avoids being eaten etc.

There was much discussion about how they would design their insect. The students looked at a variety of creatures under our fabulous stereo microscopes to get more inspiration.

 

This is our Sustainable Futures Room......lots of interesting things to explore and inspire.

Cream is our model in the Art Studio....

In a previous post, I wrote about how we took advantage of having our dear little Cream (of the pair Cookies and Cream), our white silky bantam visit the Art Studio. Students enjoyed being able to develop their observation skills by having her close while drawing her.

Here are some charcoal sketches from that day from our Level 3 artists.

I know it's not Autumn but......

I know...it's not Autumn...it's winter....

While the majority of our plantings are native, we do have some deciduous trees in our gorgeous gardens. They were planted decades ago and they are wonderful to show seasonal change, colour and contrast.

We collect the leaves to add to our compost bins in layers but we couldn't resist a bit of fun once the job was done!

I wondered why a group of students were not focussed on my "wonderful" lesson about Bugs yesterday...(well I thought it was.)  It wasn't until one said  "Hey look at that cool nest!" that we all had to stop and head over to the window to wonder what had made this amazing nest clothed in leaves. Is it a home for a bird family? Or maybe a dear little possum has taken up residence....

Printing in Art.....

It is always fabulous seeing what our little artists come up with when they are exploring ways to make art works. Today we were print making and I love the fact that my job of Art teacher and Sustainable Futures teacher overlaps in many ways. The theme chosen by many of our artists monoprinting today involved the gardens, creatures and the planet. (without suggestion from me....  :) )

Here are a few prints.....not too many as it is a bit busy in an artroom in which every child is in charge of a roller, black ink and  is moving around to store their prints and collect more paper for the next print...am I crazy??? It was fun though....

We will work more on these next week taking these artworks further by adding colour with water colour paints.

This was a bit blurry as he was keen to get onto the next one!

Great fun and learning in the Bush Tucker Garden.

Another great day in the garden! Level 4 students got stuck into working in the Bush Tucker Garden, showing just what is achievable when working as a team. Everyone settled into various tasks beginning with some planting. We had been given some native plants from a very generous parent, Jacqui's and Alicia's mum, Jeanette who is a great supporter of our school gardens. We grew them on to larger plants and today it was perfect timing to put them in.

Lots of other work included weeding, raking, sweeping and general tidying. One group decided that we could borrow (?)  some rocks from our Discovery Garden to put around as a mulch near the bird bath and to make the pathway clearer. Everyone got on board and the result was fabulous.

Lessons in Sustainable Futures often revolve around what is happening our gardens and today with our focus on the Bush Tucker Garden our discussions included how our indigenous Aborigines cared for their environment when gathering their food. One plant which is fruiting at the moment is the Midyim Berry (Austromyrtus Dulcis). We had a tasting of this delicious berry and I noticed that some students returned at recess to have another taste.

One of our teachers, Joyanne loves Midyim Berries so we let her have a taste before they disappeared....

She described the taste as an explosion of flavour!