Today I went to the school with Ms. Allen to check on the Kindergarten and First Grade gardens. We were amazed that they are still doing so well in this terrible heat! We even saw one plant with a small sunflower blooming! Wow. We were so excited. If you haven't written a story yet this summer we challenge you to write a How To book about how to plant and care for our sunflowers. We would love to see your books when you come back to school and you could share them with your new First Grade teacher and with the new Kindergarten kids. Your new teacher would be so excited to see that you are such dedicated students to practice your writing skills over the summer break. What a great way to impress your First Grade teacher with your amazing skills as an author and illustrator! We know you can do it! Here are some pictures for you to use in your research on sunflowers. With an adult you could get a sunflower book at the library. You can also look at the pictures on the blog and use that awesome brain to remember what the gardens looked like before you left school in May. You learned how to research in Kindergarten when we did our animal studies in Book Clubs during Reading Workshop so go ahead and use those skills to write your how to book.
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| Look at how tall our sunflowers are growing! Even with the very hot temperatures and little rain over the past two weeks our sunflowers keep on growing! I do see some weeds creeping up in our gardens. I also notice that the ground is cracking from lack of water. What else do you notice? |
See how the plants are getting brown at the bottom? I think they are very thirsty. I need to take up a hose and water our gardens! Mr. Lee said there is a water valve outside so I need to bring the hose to school, hook it up and give our gardens a great big drink!
This is the First Grade garden. Some of their wild flowers are blooming. They are so pretty!
If you look closely you can see the plants forming the flowers. It is really interesting. Maybe if you live close to the school you and your grown-up (and please take a grown up with you) can walk up to the garden and study/observe the flowers. You could take your notebook and draw what you observe. Maybe you could pull the weeds. Do you think that would help or hurt the flowers? Why do you think that. Could you draw a picture of that an put it into your book explaining why weeding a garden is helpful? I know you can!
This little sunflower is almost ready to bloom. Do you see the flower forming? How long do you think it will take before the flower comes out to greet us? Do you think it will take a day, two days, a week, a month? Why do you think that? Justify your answer to your grown up. Do you think we will have flowers when we come back to school? What color do you think those flowers will be? Will they all be the same size? Will any of the plants have more than one flower on it? Write down your thinking. People that study plants are called botanists. Maybe you will want to be a botanist when you grow up and study plants!
Here are the Kindergarten and First Grade gardens. I can't wait to see all of the flowers when they bloom. I think it will be very pretty. We can harvest the sunflowers this fall when it gets cooler and the days get shorter again. We can take those seeds from the flowers and plant them again! We can also toast and eat some of the seeds! Yummy!
These flowers are reaching toward the sky. See how I got down on the ground and took the picture looking up toward the sky so you could get a good perspective on how tall they are getting? We use perspective when we draw illustrations in our books we create. Tell your grown up what you learned in Writing Workshop about how to draw pictures to show perspective. You will learn in art class about perspective in drawing and painting too! This will make you a better illustrator! It is a lot of fun to look at the world from different perspectives. So, go start that book. We can't wait to see them. We may even have Golden Paws for those that write stories this summer! Wouldn't that be amazing to get a Golden Paw your first week back at school?
