Earth Day, Kale, Weeding and Planting Flowers

Earth Day

We've done a lot these past few weeks, we held our first ever Earth Day event on April 23rd and had a blast! We made little recyclable Earth Day passports for the kids to make sure they got to enjoy all of the activities we had planned for them and it was a lot!

First we greeted them with chicks! Which all of the kids enjoyed holding and I think for many of them it was their first time getting to hold one. We had a craft station where we made recycled crafts using old CDs to make CD reflectors for the garden, toilet paper cardboard roll bird feeders, and egg carton caterpillars :) 

We also had a start your own mushroom log station where the kids got to hold and use a drill (with supervision of course). The wonderful Jeremy Rushlow had a wonderful set up where he instructed everyone on how to start and I think a lot of the kids and parents really enjoyed the workshop.

The sustainability team led a stream clean up with the kids which was really hands on and they cleaned up quite a bit. There seemed to be a lot of deflated balls in the stream. Hmm. I think the kids enjoyed getting in the muck and exploring.

And the most exciting of all was we got the compost built! Taylor James, a sustainable development student designed this wonderful compost structure to sustain the garden and her vision came to be in two hours when a group of fraternity members from ASU came by to build the whole thing. 

Overall, the Earth Day event was a huge success and we got a lot done and the best part was everything we used was totally recyclable! A special thanks to Dr. Lanae Ball and her community nutrition class at ASU for preparing amazing snacks. We can't wait for next year! 

Now on to what we've been teaching the kids about in the garden :)

Harvesting Kale & Kale Chips

This was a great lesson! It was a lovely sunny day and the kale was ready to be harvested. We sorted the kids in to three groups that we rotated, a craft group, a nutrition education group and a harvesting group!

The craft group got to decorate kale chips that we cut out of construction paper in hopes that they'll love kale that much more! The nutrition education group had a lovely lesson planned where they would state a fact about a vegetable that we planted in the garden and they would then have to paste a cut out veggie on to a drawing of a person to show which part of the body the vegetable provides benefits to. They really loved that one! The kale harvesting group got to go out to the garden and harvest the many bunches of kale and then prepare kale chips that they got to enjoy at lunch! Yum yum.

Weeding

The garden was starting to get a little full of weeds so we decided to organize a lesson about all the different weeds we could find in the garden. We had two big groups, one was the craft group where the kids pulled up a bunch of weeds and then made a work of art as a class. They each got to take some paint and stamp the paper, which made a funky new decoration for the garden. The second group was led by our garden team which taught the kids all about the weeds growing all around the garden (especially ground ivy). They learned about the weed, then got to pull it and wow did they pull a lot of weeds. 

Planting Flowers

Well Mother's Day was coming up and the weather was warming up so we'd decided to teach the kids about planting flowers! We read them a book about how flowers grow from little seeds and then they got to go out and learn how to plant the flowers. We hope to see some sprouts soon :) 

Well we sure are getting things going and growing. We can't wait for the warm summer to bring lots of colors to our garden and we are so very excited for more lessons.

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