Sunflowers

 With our garden harvested it was time to plant some more seeds to grow. With the sun shining upon us we decided to plant some sunflowers. The children have been enjoying painting sunflowers and making playdough and cardboard sunflowers too. 

While we were planting, we found a centipede in the soil. This was very interesting to observe in a tray for a short while before we put it back in the garden, it had sooo many legs and moved so quickly.

We can't wait to see our sunflowers sprout up so we can put them in the garden and then when we come back after the holidays we will be able to see how tall they have grown! 

Ice science

 We had some dinosaurs frozen into a big block of ice. We were wondering how to rescue the dinosaurs, and some of the tamariki came up with really cool ideas. 

“Put the ice block under running water” - Cohen

“Hit it with something” ­-­­­­ Riya

“We have to melt in the sun” ­­­­­­- Eliza

“Put lots of cold water” ­- Lily

We tried all the options, and our ice started to melt. Tamariki loved to rescue all the frozen dinosaurs, learning some science along the way. Ice activities are great for learning about reversible change, temperature, and properties of water and developing our observational skills. Our frozen dinosaurs rescue mission kept the learning fun and exciting as each dinosaur was rescued!

 

From garden to table

It is harvest time at Uxbridge!  Our garden was just overflowing with lots of delicious vegetables just waiting and ready to be eaten. All of our tamariki have been great kaitiaki helping to look after the garden and it has been so exciting to watch and observe as it has grown from seed to plant. In our garden we are lucky enough to have a variety of vegetables - brocolli, cauliflower, spinach and silverbeet and over the past week as we have been discussing what delicious nutrious meal could we make with all these ingredients?  We had a lot of great suggestions but a stir fry it was!  This meal was going to be full of organic homegrown goodness! Yum!

Harvesting and preparing our meal was quite the process as we picked, pulled and washed all our veges.  Everyone was keen to participate and be part of the process, helping out as sous chef, chopping, grating, peeling and tearing the veges up.  Then it was cooking time..... , a little soy sauce, salt, pepper and ginger added to the fry pan with vegetables, a quick mix and stir and voila! We had a delicious yummy lunch from garden to table.

Most enjoyed the veges, slurping down the whole lot, some were not so keen and some even enjoyed a second helping.  We were impressed everyone was keen to give it a try at least.

Experiences like this where Tamariki are able to have a part in the production and preparation of food, contributes to their understanding about Papatuanuku, and the world around them, how things grow and how we are able to use the things that we grow to produce food to eat.

We can't wait for our next table to garden, I wonder what we will create next?