My neighborhood has a produce exchange once a month. This month I brought nine bundles of collards and bok toy, with ten leaves in each bundle. In exchange, I got a bag of lemons and oranges, celery, beets, fennel and a few baked goods.
Weeds Found a Way in our Garden — So We Made Art! February 1, 2015
Kindergarteners read Weeds Find a Way, by Cindy Jenson-Elliott, then pulled weeds and then learned their names. They drew several iterations of their chosen weed and worked hard to get the details right in their pictures. Here are the results.
Creating Westlandia in the Garden
Using Paul Fleishman’s book Weslandia in the garden:
I read Weslandia, the amazing picture book by Paul Fleishman, about a boy who does not quite fit in to his neighborhood, who creates his own civilization in his back yard. Then half my students set out to create SunflowerLandia, by transplanting sunflowers that had come up randomly throughout the garden and creating more sunflower rooms and houses for children to play in. Students wrote about what their SunflowerLandia would need to have in it, and what they would create out of their “staple crop,” as Wesley did in Weslandia.
When all the sunflowers had been transplanted, another group of children created a miniature Weslandia in our pollinator garden by making fairy houses.
Whale Watching Wonders
One of my school garden sites is across the street from the beach. The other day, taking a group of kindergartners down to the garden, we saw spouts out in the ocean! Today, my children and I went whale watching on a Hornblower boat out of San Diego bay. Sometimes you see whales, and sometimes you don’t. The captain was fabulous, great at spotting animals and, while being polite to other boats and respectful of the animals, gave us time to really enjoy watching them.
On the way out, we saw a pod of Pacific White-sided dolphins who body-surfed in the prow wake of our boat for a long time.
We saw at least 20 Grey Whale spouts, and watched three for a long time. Then, out on the horizon, the captain spotted something unusual. A small humpback whale, breaching! We stayed with it for an hour, cheering it on. 
Nature Explorer 