In Room 4 this semester, our goal will be to blog each day from Monday through Thursday. On Fridays we have our planning meeting, so we won’t have time to write a whole blog post.
During the past two days, the children have been drawing plans for the garden box and talking more about what they are planning. Due to some issues with technology, there are no photos of this activity to share on the blog yet. However, imagine, if you will, that the children are drawing ideas on maps that are in the shape of our garden box. It’s pretty exciting to see their plans! We are writing the children’s names under the plans and their garden ideas. We have seen even more ideas develop about the garden just in the past couple of days.
To take this investigation to the next step, we would like to schedule a walk next week. We would like to walk onto campus on Wednesday, August 28, and observe the plants we see on campus. We could walk to the Horticulture area and to other areas of campus. The children could sketch the plants they see and we could take photos of plants. It might help us refine our ideas of what we could plant. We need volunteers for this walk from 8:45 until about 9:45 or 10:00 a.m. We can only go if we have enough adults in our group to keep the group safe. If you can walk with us, please email Laura at Lpaciorek@miracosta.edu or sign up in the classroom near the sign-in book. We hope to walk on a Tuesday or Thursday in the next week or so, so please keep that in mind if your child attends one of those days.
Taking a walk onto campus helps children connect with the larger community. One aspect of the Reggio Emilia philosophy, which we embrace at the Center, is a connection to the community. Here at the CDC at MiraCosta, that means going on walking field trips. We cannot leave campus, but that’s okay. There is a lot we can learn just by walking on campus together. Many of the children talk about it as the “big school” where their family members may even be attending class. We have observed great excitement in the children when they get to explore the “big school” beyond our yard.
We know that families are eager to help with the gardening in our garden box. We are still thinking deeply about what to plant, but we could start to work on the soil, for sure. If you have any soil that is safe for children to handle and/or compost for us to use (Oceanside residents can get it for free – ask Laura how!), we will gladly take donations to help us get our garden box more ready for plants. We may do container gardening at some point and we can always use extra soil and compost no matter what, even if we get more than we can immediately use.
Thank you for reading this update! It has been a great week so far. We can’t wait for tomorrow. We will start up our blogging again next week. We will also start up highlighting interest areas once we can upload photos here again. Have a great Friday and weekend.