Elementary STREAMS and Outdoor Environment 02.02.2020

Welcome to our weekly online newsletter and Happy February!

This week in STREAMS we combined art, science, and our outdoor environment, by using the chlorophyll from the leaves in our garden to make art. We talked about how the chlorophyll is what makes leaves green, and the role in plays in photosynthesis. We used different tools (our fingers, spoons, wood blocks) to crush the leaves and use the green pigment to make art. Added bonus, more senses were engaged when we realized that not only did our art look beautiful, but the smell of each plant transferred over to the paper as well.

We also continued to collect milk cartons for our garden, a daily task that we proudly take on each afternoon. We had several stations to work on this week, including some of our classroom art for the Atlantis fundraiser, bead sorting, and a tinker table: we took apart a broken record player, put it back together, and then took it apart all over again. It was very interesting to see how many tiny parts are underneath the surface, and trying to figure out how they all work together to play music.

In our outdoor environment, we continued to prep the garden for spring planting, by breaking up some of our high in clay content soil, weeding our herb garden, and trimming back a tree that was creating a bit too much shade. We also added some new seedling to the garden, and we are hoping that the cold weather in the upcoming week doesn’t harm our baby plants. We now have a second way to use up our food scraps at school, a tumbling composter! We will continue to use our worm compost as well, but now we can make sure that even less of our food waste ends up in the trash. Finally, we spent some time doing heavy work by removing excess dirt and smoothing out the rocks in our new sound garden.

It was a joy to see so many students and meet so many parents at the STEM fest on Saturday. Thank you all for stopping by our STREAMS table to say hello!

-Ms. Hubbard