Fall 2023 - Week Fourteen

December 16, 2023  •  Vol. 14

More great news!! According to Harvey Epstein’s office, the NYC Parks Department has agreed to provide the remaining nine tree guards for us this spring. Hooray! I am so proud of our kids and their hard work caring for their adopted trees. Our school’s janitorial staff has also stopped placing the garbage and recycling in the tree wells, and I’m seeing less and less trash around the trees every week. I hope that the children will feel a sense of ownership around these changes due to their work caring for the trees.

On Monday, during the Nature show and tell, I brought in some items from my own outdoor space and we talked about how they are connected in an ecosystem. Then we got to work mulching our trees. When we returned to our garden home base we created ecosystems of our own in a terrarium. Then we visited the composter, and the children figured out how to spin it on their own without any help!

On Tuesday, we celebrated our Fall birthdays with hot cocoa, marshmallows and donuts. I also took some dried anise from the garden and a clear tea pot so the children could see how to make tea from dried herbs. The festivities put everyone in a good mood and we had a lot of fun visiting the trees with buckets full of leaves for mulch. We also added a few more decorations on them. Finally we worked on more terrariums and created custom paper gift bags with potato stamps.

On Wednesday, we celebrated a few more Fall birthdays as well as our tree guard news. We also had fun looking at seed catalogs to think about what to plant next spring. There was a great discussion on ecosystems, food chains and how we are all connected. We then visited a few trees before returning to create terrariums and popcorn-cranberry garlands. We wrapped up after hours with a game of tag, the Wednesday group’s favorite activity to end the day.