Getting our hands dirty

Our square foot garden is in!


I know it doesn't look like much, but that's 2, 2x6 foot gardens that should give us a good amount of tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, peas, and broccoli. It's a place to start, given my historic black thumb.

Nugget worked really hard on the garden, mixing, moving, and shoveling. We talked a lot about compost, where it comes from, and why plants need it.

I've made up a seed matching game, inspired by My Montessori Journey.

And we're still loving the various plant books by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace!

The next experiment we'll do is to sprout some seeds and then see how they react with and without sunlight, with and without water, and with and without soil.

Leaf walk!

This evening, between dinner and bath, Nugget requested that we go on a leaf walk. I'd mentioned last post about not seeing much variety in the trees in our neighborhood, but I thought we'd give it a shot.

It turned out we had a really good time! Sure enough, the great great majority of the trees we saw were Live Oaks. But we found a few other ones along the way, about 8-10 types of leaves. By the time we got home it was nearly bath so we only got to look at them briefly. But they're pressing under some of my husband's nursing textbooks tonight, so we can take more time with them tomorrow.

I'm having a lot of fun having this undercurrent of plants running through this month. It gives me a consistent angle to look for in our daily lives.

Life and time are great teachers

I've been feeling conflicted lately on backing off of formal Montessori time. I really, really admire the bloggers out there who are doing a couple of hours of at-home preschool, and that was what I wanted for us. It's hard to give up that vision, even when I can see that it's not fitting in to our life right now. I've been doing a lot of second- and third-guessing.

So it's nice to have a moment to see that something is working. This evening, for instance. A few weeks ago, I posted about doing patterns with Nugget, and how it was just out of her grasp. She's mentioned patterns a few other times since then, but we haven't "worked" on them.

She had some foam puzzles out after dinner and she started lining them up. She called me over and asked if they were patterns -- she'd arranged them by background color in groupings like yellow-orange-yellow-orange and pink-purple-pink-purple.

So many times now, I've seen that it's often much more about time for her to grow and develop rather than anything I directly teach her.

And in the realm of life-as-teacher -- we've started a square foot garden! We've been sprouting seeds inside (or were, until the cat hopped up to munch them all), and we built the frames the other day. Nugget got lots of counting practice bringing me "4 screws and 4 washers".

Since we're focusing on plants this month, I'd wanted to go on a leaf walk. But our neighborhood in Florida has nothing but oaks and pines, oaks and pines, pines and oaks. I'm hoping to get out to a local nature preserve when it's a bit cooler.

On that topic, I found a fabulous book at our library. "Leaves! Leaves! Leaves!" is written for young kids but covers things like photosynthesis. Nugget loved it and has been bringing up parts of it at random times for days now. I really want to check out some of her other books.