If you can go to a garden, go

We went to my community garden today, as part of our science unit on plants. PSOhYes has a garden, but we went to see the composting, mostly. There was also still a lot to see, even in mid-October, as a lot of things like pumpkins had not been harvested.

Can I just tell you how excited these kids were? They ran up to me saying things like "I did SIX sketches and I want to do six more!!!!!!" And you know, even if they stopped after two, they were still running around looking at the pumpkins and the other plants, looking for snails, wondering why the mosquitoes were not as bad in the sunny, open parts of the garden- they could not have been more engaged.

I had one of my fellow gardeners, who works a lot with our compost, come to talk to the students for about 15 minutes about compost, what goes in and where we get it, what comes out and what we do with it, and what happens in between. He found them some worms to play with- very exciting!- and some intrepid kids put their hands on the steaming, partially-cooked compost. The steam coming off of that pile got a big "Ooooh!" as well.

It was, all in all, a really stellar field trip, and we really didn't have to do much except set them loose and make sure they understood the rules. Some kids even contributed to the compost pile with scraps from their lunch!

Here is an excellent example of some of the sketching they did today: