The letter "G", the ground, seeds and songs!

This pic was my favorite of the week and shows off our "G" is for ground learning unit perfectly!  This week we talked about the ground.  It's a natural choice for the children.  They have watched the grass grow and fade, the rain fall and be soaked up, and now the snow fall and melt.  We have planted seeds and watched them grow.  We have harvested our SINGLE surviving vegetable plant...our oddly shaped cucumber that tasted a bit like the ground it came from!  We have made mud and watched as the drought browned and scorched the flowers and plants.  All of these events have brought lots of questions and now...the GROUND is cold, frozen and hard.  So when we came upon the letter "G," once again, and we were discussing different things that started with the letter "G," we determined that the ground would be a fun topic of study.  In this picture we have made a worm farm.  We talked about the purpose of the worms in the ground.   We learned that worms are decomposers and we made up a sweet little worm song.  We read about worms and found out what they like to eat and how they move.  During this week my little girl came down with the flu as well, sooo...we didn't get to finish all our wormy activities, but not to worry, Spring is right around the corner!

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A worm farm?  Well...I'm glad you asked!

The first part to any respectable worm farm is, of course, the dirt!  And who wouldn't want to bring a bit of the outside INSIDE for some scientific sensory exploration?!  We used what's called "organic soil."  I found this quite humorous since...really...what soil isn't?  BUT, I wanted the BEST for our worm friends and opted to purchase a bag of "organic" soil.  We poured about half the bag into our biggest plastic bin (with a lid that had pre-drilled holes for air).  For a while we just let the children experience the dirt.  The younger ones dug right in.  The older ones were curious and just wanted to move onto adding the WORMS!  Soooo....we did just that...

Twenty little earthworms...

Since we were talking about the ground and earthworms, we kind of took a divergent path and got in depth about our wormy friends.  We learned that eartworms are decomposers, that they help turn dead plants into dirt and help the ground to grow new living things. 

We also learned that earthworms only have a sense of feeling.  That they move through the ground finding their way around with just how things FEEL to them.  We praticed only using our sense of feel.  In this lesson we closed our eyes to see if we could tell what was wet and what was dry. 
We discussed that we have "senses" and that we were NOT using our sense of sight, or smell, or hearing, but rather, our sense of FEEL.  Each child took a turn, eyes closed, stating which cloth was dry or wet.  We further observed that we could find our way across the table to the wet cloth just by feeling our way...just like a worm. 

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Our wormy friends were a BIG hit.  We measured their length with "non" conforming standards of measurement.  We used paper, blocks, crackers (we didn't eat them!((the worms or crackers!!!)).  We decided that the worms were different sizes around and different lengths.  We looked at them through our magnifying glasses and we could see their rings.  We also made up an earthworm song...

(To the tune, I'm a Little Teapot)

I'm a little earthworm soft and slow,
through the earth I like to go.
I'm a decomposer so you know,
I'll eat the plants from down below!

The Seeds Go Down, Into The Ground!

First...click the title above to see the CUTEST little girls around sing this sweet little song about seeds growing in the ground!

Ok...so we also did (and are still doing) ALOT of study about the ground.  This includes seeds.  How are the grown, what do they need, how fast will they sprout, can we water them again...why not???? 

Children LOVE dirt, this is such and EASY topic to hold their attention with.  ANYTHING they can water and water and water is going to get LOTS of TLC (maybe a bit much).

However, despite all the GREAT love our preschoolers have shown these beans they are GROWING.  We closely examined the roots coming out of the beans.  We noticed that the roots were indeed going "DOWN" into the soil and, as of the post...we didn't yet have any stems.  We will continue to nurture our plants and update our progress.

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