"Can I take this home?" "Nope, we need to see what we can use it for first, then you can take it home."

This is how a student finds her voice. By allowing her ideas to be accepted and built on. Let's see where this "working art" goes today. 

Drowning Soil Update

"The seeds are floating."

"The seeds moved around."

"They are bigger!"

"Ewwwww!"

As we continue to get rain this week, and our friends east of us in Quebec deal with flooding, the impact of "drowning the soil" begins to have real life implications. 

 

Drowning Lima Beans...and planting a Mango tree.

"The seeds moved when we drowned them!"

"They disappear."

"eww."

As for the mangos, the kids enjoy them and so we will learn why they can't grow in our school. 

MMMmmmm Mangos

Today, I had trouble accepting that my expectations were high. I mean to ask students to weigh Taste, Smell, Sight, and Feel and rank 5 different mangos when I think about it, makes me laugh. I thought I would be able to sit back with a clipboard and write down students' quotes but quickly realized that some needed assistance moving around the round table, accessing the slippery fruit in a healthy way, and managing turn taking. Some threw their voting chips into a bucket without trying all of the mangos, so the vote could very well be inaccurate. But since this is Kindergarten, we used the opportunity to graph our vote and am happy to announce that the Haden mango (from Florida) was declared best mango (first photo). My recommendation is to try an unripened Haden. Tart and less of a mess.

But here's the thing with today that I (we) could stand to remember. We need to manage our expectations. Things rarely go the way we had it planned and it's the ability to deal with or recover from these moments that builds resiliency. At 37, your children are helping me practice this daily. Today, after we graphed the mangos, students began to conduct surveys throughout the class. That was their self-directed follow up activity that I could have NEVER planned for. It came out of what appeared to be nowhere, but if we believe that everything is something, then we can trust that our kids are going to access our developmental curriculum naturally, sometimes randomly, and when they are ready. All we have to do is provide the mangos. :)

Mangos

A few days ago, the students were asking about a fruit I had, later I'd find out it's an "Amm" in Urdu. They wanted to try it, and they did. Majority agreed, they were delicious so I went and bought 5 types from various places in the world. Today we created a criteria of what made a good mango:

• smell
• texture/feel (in hands and mouth)
• coloring
• taste

Tomorrow, we rate these areas from 1-5 and determine which is the CHAMPION MANGO. 

Soil vs. Dirt vs. Mud

"Add water" to make mud. 

So we did.

"Ewwww, it's so gross."

"It feels cold."

"Mud makes you dirty."

"We drowned the soil." *

*As the adult, this one stands out as a quote we can use to explore natural/built environments and our impact on it. 

Soil Has Air?

Yup.