Our First Fall Harvest

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!

Kindergarten's Tag and Release Project

At story time recently we read Sam Swope's and Sue Riddle's book called "Gotta Go! Gotta Go!" and found out that monarch butterflies migrate to Mexico for the winter. The butterflies that we are release this month will fly over two thousand miles to the overwintering sites in the Sierra Madre mountains in Michoacan, Mexico.

Our kindergarten class is taking part in the University of Kansas' Monarch Watch's tag and release program http://www.monarchwatch.org. Before we release our butterflies we hand-feed them and attach a small sticker to the hind wing of each butterfly. Each sticker has a special code that is recorded here at Friends School Haverford and sent to Monarch Watch. We learned to identify males and females based on the markings on the hind wings. This information is helpful to researchers, too. If one of our tagged butterflies is found along the migration route or in Mexico this winter, the information from the tag is again recorded and sent to the university. The university has an extensive data base that is used to track the migration patterns of the monarchs.






Over the next six weeks kindergarten will be following the southward migration of the Monrach butterflies with online maps and migration updates on Journey South's website: http://www.learner.org/jnorth/monarch/

Stay tuned!

Butterfly Lollipops!

We are hand-raising monarchs this fall. After watching the butterflies emerge from their chrysalides we waited 24 hours until the wings dried before we handled them and hand-fed them Gatorade "nectar" on the end of a Q-tip.

What a thrill to feel the tickle of butterfly feet in our hands and the delicate wings held gently between two fingers. The butterflies loved their "butterfly lollipops" and gratefully extended their proboscis (their straw-like tongues) into the Gatorade-soaked paper towels to drink. Some butterflies sought nectar from the bouquet of flowers we brought in from the garden and put in the terrarium.

Every now and then a butterfly would escape from our hands and fly about the room. That was exciting for everyone. Kindergartners did a great job tracking the butterfly as it flew and when it landed and folded its wings up like sails on a sailboat, kindergartners picked it up ever so gently and returned it to the feeding station.

Wonder Awaits...

On the first day of school several children shared a most curious story. They told us that they found of two caterpillars hanging upside down like "Letter J's." "Come on, Tr. Ann, we will show you!" By the time we arrived to take a look, both caterpillars had become chrysalides. We wondered why the caterpillars decided to hang upside down under the window and near the vent cover.
We checked the chrysalides every day. They were green and had gold spots. They matched the Monarch chrysalides that we have in our classroom perfectly. Now we know that these are Monarch chrysalides, too! "Hmmm. How did a white, black, and yellow caterpillar make such a beautiful lime-green case with gold dots?" we wondered. Monarch caterpillars are white, black, and yellow-striped! How curious! When it rained, the chrysalides got a little bit wet; we could see the drops of water on them. We checked them everyday for one week. Three days ago we saw the patterns of Monarch wings appearing on the inside of the chrysalides.

Today we came back from outdoor play and had a surprise! Both butterflies had come out! One had already flown away (Aha! That explains the monarch we saw flying at outdoor play...) but the other was still hanging upside down drying her wings. We thought we could bring it indoors so that we could tag it tomorrow when we tag our other butterflies.

Gently we carried the butterfly indoors and put it in the terrarium.

We watched as it climbed up the netting...

...and joined the other butterflies near the top. We carried the terrarium to a nearby table so that we could watch them while we ate lunch. The new butterfly seems to be making friends already!

Kindergaraten...The Amazing Journey Begins

We warmly welcome all of our kindergartners and their families to campus for the 2011-2012 school year! As butterflies emerge from their chrysalides, feed in our hands, and take flight from the garden this week, we will nurture the children's developing sense of our weekly schedule, classroom routines, and behavioral expectations of a kindergartner at Friends School Haverford. Already the kindergarten classroom resonates with the sound of children's laughter and the unmistakeable sound of wonder in the "Aha!' moments that arise during a morning story, in the nature corner when the dark cuticle of a chrysalis suddenly cracks open and butterfly wings appear, or at the art table as three children figure out the best way to fold the wings of a paper airplane. It promises to be an amazing year for our eighteen kindergartners!