Kindergartners have been keeping a close eye on the ripening tomatoes and green peppers in Kindergarten's Salsa Garden. The garden is located at the top of the boardwalk observation ramp a few steps outside our back door. The garden is planted every spring by the rising first grade class for the rising kindergarten class. This fall the garden is teeming with lush green tomato plans, basil plants going into seed, fragrant sprays of chives and oregano plants, sweet spearmint, Sunset Honeysuckle, three kinds of peppers (Bell, Banana, and Italian), and a first-season grape vine.
This week we harvested vegetables from the Salsa Garden for the very first time. Our bowl filled up quickly with brightly colored vegetables. It was a lot of fun looking for the vegetables on the plants and picking them by ourselves.
Later in the morning we made a graph with our vegetables. We counted each kind of pepper and every tomato. We practiced adding. We practiced subtracting. We practiced estimating. We talked about "more than" and "less than" as we compared the number of one kind of vegetable to another. We compared the lengths of the rows on our graph as we passed around the bowl, every kindergartner having a turn to add on to the graph one vegetable at a time.
Look at our results!
12 Tomatoes. 10 Italian peppers. 7 Bell peppers. 4 Banana peppers. Wow!
