composter bin

For the next months I want M. to get to know and understand how nature works and what must be our contribution to nature. I was waiting for a bit of sunshine after all this rain to get starting with our gardening projects: first of all make a little home made composter bin, to teach M. that nothing in nature goes to waste and how composter is so important for plants and that she can make a contribution to the cycle of nature. We made the composter bin in a small scale just to start off. A small containers with holes, some soil on the bottom of the container and as many vegetarian left over as possible, I covered ours with cardboard.

Now she is aware that potatoes, carrots peels, egg shells, banana skin etc are all good to make compost and she is always remember to fill up the composter bin! Of course she knows that compost is good food for plants, so we must grow a few plants to give the compost to. As last year we got growing veg, but this year I want to add a couple of new friends: we already have quite tall tomatoes plants (4), we have already eaten our spinach and lettuce and already seeded for more of them and iceberger lettuce, we then prepared to have green beans and cucumbers.

chicken pox creative week

M. has just recovered from this awuful chicken pox.To make her days more worth while, I took out this wonderful air dry clay and we got down to work on our creations. She loved it so much I couldn't stop her from wanting to do more and more staff. We made a pizza, a cake, a car, a pen holder, a key ring...Then we put them to dry and after 24 hours they were ready to be painted.







We then started with our vegetable garden adventure, preparing for spinach, tomatoes, basil and lattuce for now.

gardening updates

Our gardening flowers/veg experiment is going good. We had a good amount of strawberries, which M. is able to pick, wash and eat by herself; she has been very keen on observing and caring for the plants, and she is very happy to be able to collect the fruits of her work. The tomotoes and cocumbers are growing fast, no flowers yet but I am hoping. Flower bubls have turned into leaves, so now it is just a matter of waiting, we'll probably have some flowers in July.







The caterpillars have grown a lot and they were very hungry caterpillars. The last two weeks I had to change their leaves very 2-3 days and the poor bush where I was getting their leaves couldn't cope with it; I had to try to offer them another kind of leaf, which luckely they liked. Now one of them has turned into a crysalid, other two are working on it. I only have two left which are still eating away.
The transformation happened quite quickly. It started making a kind of spider net, then the next morning he has already inside its coocon which lays on this net. The coocon was yellow, then it turned to orange, when I looked at it in the late afternoon it was black!

planting mania

After the success of the daffodils, me and M. decided to have a little flowers corner in the communal green area, which kept on expanding and so far we have put down 4 variety of flowers and around 30-35 bulbs! The experience of growing flowers made us so excited that we moved to sowing vegetables and herbs: tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, spinach and basil.
Every morning M. goes to have a look to all these pots and she calls me so enthusiastically to come and see a new leave, or something new from the ground. She is also in charge of watering all of them.
She is doing so much learning about the environment she is part of. It is good thing children learn a bit about gardening and growing plants, because this gives them a sense of pride and responsability,more over it instills in them respect for the environment and all living things. She also learns about the life cycle of flowers and plants, where vegetable comes from, what they need to grow and all other related things.
I would like to now plant some strawberries because she will be able to eat the fruit of her work!



Relating to sowing and planting is the little project started this late autumn by planting the daffodils bulbs. we follow their growth throughtout the winter, from small leaves coming out from the ground, to blossoms and then beautiful flowers. For all these transformation I took a picture, to build the life cycle of a flower in photos. the last one was of the daffodils withering.
Now we have the all life cycle and M. can look at it and remembering all the growing the daffodils went through, she can also try and order all the phases from bulb to withering.

EGGY HAIR

This is a nice gardening activity to make even without garden. It takes really little space e doesn't need lots of materials.
What you will get at the end will be cress...but it will look like hair on a face painted on a egg shell.

Materials:

- egg shell
- cress seeds
- cotton wool
- eggs cartoon

1. draw or paint a simple face on each of the broken egg shells
2. dips ball of cotton in a bowl of water so that they are completely soaked




3. fill the egg shell with the wet cotton wool and put it back in his cartoon
sprinkle cress seeds over the cotton wool




4. put some dirt on top of the seeds
5. put the eggs on a window sill and wait for a few days
6. remember to keep the cotton wool wet

DAYS OUT

As part of our world project I took M. to visit the British Museum for the Africa and South America sections, and to the Victoria and Albert Museum for the Asian section.
It seems a bit hazardous taking children to big museum, full of staff that they can't touch,there are no toys, and do not know what it is for. But for M. is different. I was observing her in front of the museums windows boxes, observing Japanese kimonos and samurai armors, African musical instrument and Native American clothes, and she didn't look at all out of place in that big hall full of adults. M. was very interested in what she was seeing, she asked many questions and I could see that she was digging in her memory and fishing out all the information I gave her about how people around the world dress, and live. The things she was observing behind that glass had meaning for her and she highly enjoyed the experience.








GARDENING

We tryed again to plat some bulbs. Last winter we didn't succeed much, only one flower bloomed in our pot kept indoors, so this time I wanted to try to plant daffodils outside in the common green area.
This time was a real bloom!
now all our daffodils are in bloom and I want to make cards with their photos to keep as a life cycle experience. M. helped me through all the phases of planting and kept on going and observing every little change during the flowers' cycle.

I have not been feeling great this week. Didn't do much. There has been few nice warm days and we went out to the park, and did some wild life observations. M. is really into observing animals, insects and flowers. We looked at snails, ladybirds, warms and daffodils in the local parks

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GARDENING

Also our hyacits have finally bloomed, after all the care we gave them. The tulips have still a long way to go, but we will wait.






Now I need to develop the photos of all the stages from bulb to flower and display them on a poster so that M. can remember the life cycle of a flower.

5 SENSES

I managed to put together the touch section of the 5 senses laboratory.
For smooth I used a rubber glove; for rough a scrabber sponge; for soft a dust cloth; for the uneven surface a bumpy sponge. I glued each material on a piece of cartoon board.

caterpillar, caterpillar

THE WORLD AROUND US

M. has taken a deep interest in caterpillars. She already enjoyed reading "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Carle, and when one day last week I related it to her every day eating habits, that was when everything became real for her. I told her that if she ate too much chocolate she would become fat like the caterpillar and then she would have a big stomachache like it. She opened her eyes wide and she rubbed her belly to say "stomachache", she didn't ask for chocolate that day.

She started taking her caterpillar pull along toy with her every time we went out (in reality it is a snail, put taking the shell off, it may look like a caterpillar and I won't argue with M. on the fact that it is actually a snail if she is happy with it as a caterpillar)

When yesterday I told her we would go to the park to look for caterpillars she was all excited. We found one caterpillar and many worms, which we classified as caterpillars for the day. She explored her surroundings in search for caterpillars, she liked looking at them, how they looked like and moved, she didn't like to touch them, but eventually she held one in her hand for 2 seconds.

Back at home, I drew a caterpillar on an apple and I glued it on our seasons-tree; then we put on it some cotton wool as snow, so we created our winter season tree.

GARDENING

Our gardening experiment is also continuing. M. is in charge of watering our flowers when I remind her to do so. Very often we go and check on the progress, and we are really pleased to see that the giacints should be blooming soon. The tulips are still a bit sleepy but are growing too.

COLOURS

We are continuing our discovery of colours and their names.

I managed to get her focus for 2 other colours: orange and purple/bourdeux.

For this two colours I showed her how mixing 2 different colours together we can obtain a third colour. First I mixed red and yellow to obtain orange. Then I let her experiment the colour orange on a paper. After that I mixed red and blue to obtain pourple (the proportion of red was a bit too high so I rather obtain a colour closer to bourdeux, but this doesn't matter for the porpuse of our learning the colours). M. painted another paper with the pourple colour and after both papers dried I hung them on the wall next to the rest of the colour we learn to recognise.

A bit by bit I will show her most of the colours. Our journey is just at the beggining.

planting a little seed in a child, planting a bulb in a pot

Hopefully someone in the future will follow my blog, for now it's just me.




I thought I will tell you about my previous fancy activity with my girl. I got this one at the nursery where I volunteer and I thought I had to absolutely do it with M.

In fact, as soon as I got home, I rushed with the buggy down to Wilkinsons and bought some tulip and giacint bulbs for our experiment, it was October and now the giacints are almost ready to come out!




A BIT OF GARDENING



What you need here is:



soil from the supermarket


some flower bulbs (choose the one right for the season!)


flower pots


water


newspaper




Lay the newspaper on your floor or if you can just go outside so you do not have to clean afterwards! Let your little one put some soil on the bottom of the pot, then show him how to make a hole in the soil and let him drop the bulb in (the pointy end upwards). Cover the bulb completely with soil. Reapeat with the rest of the bulbs. Then fill up a small bottle with enough water for one bulb and give the task to pour the water to your child. In this way the child will be supervised and guided step by step, but he will have the feeling that he has done it all by himself.



Write the date on a lable and stick it on the vase.


Remember to water your bulbs regurarly helping your child in this task. Watch together all the progress of your little flowers!





In our case we took pictures of the development of our flowers and I intend to make a poster with all the sequences of the flower growth for M. to look at and learn the life cycle of a flower.