Preparing for Planting Day on April 21

On Friday, April 21, the amazing Custom Foodscaping team will be returning to the Restoration & Wellness campus to fill our garden beds with the perennials and other plants we’ve been preparing to care for all year. Just before spring break, as part of a Know/Want-to-Know/Learn exercise, Val asked students to document some of the questions they had about plants in general.

Do plants have thoughts?

Why are they different colors?

How does the pigment get into plants?

Why do they need sun?

Why do they need water?

Why they stink?

How long does a plant need to grow?

Why do they change colors?

Why bugs be on plants?

Val also invited students to watch a video that explores the biomechanics of the world inside a leaf produced by the California Academy of Sciences. Val writes, “I had some plants I picked up sitting around and on the tables in the room so it was a great visual for them to understand that what we see on the video is not what we can see with our naked eye and that plants feeding and surviving is happening right now with the plants in our classroom.”

Val writes, “We created some makeshift greenhouses to get our own seedlings started (see photo below). We needed to problem-solve around the temperature and moisture the seedlings needed to thrive. Some of the plants had dried out and some got too cold when we weren’t in the buildings and the heat was off. In addition to the hands-on raising of seedlings, we turned to our reading passage on plants. As we read together, the teachers and I had the students underline or highlight things that stuck out or were interesting, including things that they did not know. “

That’s all for now! In the coming days and weeks we’ll have more to share about our lessons on monotasking. Because the garden will be a screen- and phone-free space, we’re developing and implementing curriculum that can help people young and old learn how to spend time away from their cell phones.

Special thank you to my daughter, Stella Dee, for guiding us to the super cool leaf animation!

Inda