New Homes for Our Plants

Yuck! Slugs are sooooo gross, but soooo cool! They are bad for plants because they nibble on roots and leaves. This makes it hard for the plant to grow. We found a slug today when we were re-potting and splitting one of our tropical plants. We got rid of him.
It is important to re-pot plants because some plants use all the nutrients in the soil and need more soil. Re-potting them is healthy for them. Sometimes the roots take over the pot and take the shape of the pot. This is called being root bound. If we don't re-pot, the plant won't grow any larger.
We re-potted our two avocado trees today. We call them Big Brother (he's been alive for 2 years) and Little Sister (she was planted last summer). We hope that they'll be big and strong and grow avocados. We really like guacamole!
We also learned the term "back-filling" today. This means we put soil back over the roots and tamp it down to protect the plant's roots. It was awesome today! :)

We're Back!

We have finally started school again! We have new 2nd graders. Our old second graders are now 3rd graders. We are back at taking care of our gardens at school. Last week we picked evil spiky thistles. We are pulling them to make our gardens look better. The first place we pulled up thistles was in the reading garden out front. We also pulled out weeds in the gardens outside the 3rd grade classrooms. Today, we worked in our hosta garden. It had a bunch of weeds, like dandelions and baby trees. We picked and picked and picked all the grass that had grown in there, too! Some of us got to use snippers. They got to cut off all the dead flower stems off the hostas. The weird plant that we noticed last year has continued to grow. We decided to let it stay.

Happy National Arbor Day

We planted a tree today! We had to dig a hole first. It looked like Mrs. M. was on a pogo stick when she jumped on the shovel. We laughed! The tree we planted is a red oak. It's very small and skinny and when we went back to put more soil around the base, we almost couldn't see it! It blends in with the grassy field we put it in. It's supposed to be fast growing, but we don't know how fast. Hopefully by next year we won't have to worry about it being mowed when they cut the grass. Mrs. M. is going to put a fence around it so that it doesn't get mowed this year. We will have to make sure it gets water for awhile so that the roots will start growing into the soil around it.
Today at Park View is Gardening Day. So we also planted pansies and chrysanthemums in the barrel garden out front and in the reading garden. We had to dig holes there, too. We found that there were killer grubs in the soil. We threw them onto the sidewalk and squished 'em. There were also earthworms. We know that all the soil everywhere has gone through the body of an earthworm in the past two years. We made sure to put the earthworms safely back into the ground. It rained last night, so the soil was nice and soft and wet.
Park View is looking good!

Come On Spring!

We're so excited about all the new growth that showing up everywhere!

In our classroom, we have been fascinated with our space and earth seeds. We have over 20 sprouts in each planter. The leaves of the ones that are the oldest are starting to stretch out into oval, rather than being circles. They have noticed that newer plants have tiny stems and 2 thin leaves. The stems sometimes look purple or red. When they get older 2 more leaves form between the other two and then even more leaves grow from there, too.














Something interesting has happened in our earth plants. Not only do we have a stranger (that we think is grass) mushrooms grew there this week! We know that they are decomposers, but we aren't sure what it's decomposing.














The rest of our time we spent researching the different plants we have in our classroom. We are going to make little pod casts about them. We were very productive today!

Spring weather!

Today we checked on our seed experiment. We have 25 sprouts from the earth seeds and 20 sprouts from the space seeds. Each planter has a stranger. The earth planter has a plant that looks like grass. The space planter has a plant that has bigger and fatter leaves. It also looks fuzzy on the stem. These strangers probably just came from the soil.
We also looked at onion skin slides. We looked at them under the microscopes. The onion cells looked like rectangles, really long rectangles. Their corners were kind of rounded. But they were all stacked together like legos. We dyed one sample with iodine to turn the cells yellow. We hoped that the nuclei would should up better, and they did. :) It was cool.

Go to your CELL!

Today we looked at plants to see if we could find cells. There are three certain parts that every cell must have. One is the cell membrane. It protects the inside of the cell like skin. Another part is the nucleus. The nucleus is the brain of the cell. Cytoplasm is the third part. It's the liquid filling. For plants, the cells must also have a cell wall. Cell walls protect the plant from outside things. It's stronger than the cell membrane, it's thicker, too.
We made slides and looked for the different parts of a plant cell. We found them! When we first looked, we saw lots of cells piled together. Then when we looked closer we could make out the cell membranes and some of us could see the nucleus in a few. There were lots of cells.
It was really awesome and a little disgusting, too.
This cell picture came from: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/plants/cell/

Up close and personal!

Today we made slides of plants and looked at them through the microscopes. They were purple and green and they were very cool to look at. We took samples from plants in our room. We chose Mother-In-Law Tongue, Coleus, and Chrysanthemum. We also looked at prepared slides of algae, onion, and pine tree. They all had veins. We also noticed a pattern. Many of them had stripes, or circles or geometric shapes. We were surprised to see that. Some of us thought we'd just see one large piece. Instead we were impressed to see lots of little circles and squares joined together. They are cells. There were dots inside a lot of the circles and squares, too. One more thing we did was look through a strong magnifier at a pea pod. It looked hairy. It was very 3-D-ish. Very awesome.
Our space seeds and earth seeds experiment is going well. We have sprouts. Some of the sprout stems are spreading out in a V toward the leaves and some are just straight. The ones that are more grown have more circular leaves. The ones that have just gotten started have more pointy leaves. The dirt in the space container seems to be grayer - weird.