Above is Sierra's creation from Make and Take Night. The theme was abstract & verbs. Mrs. G talked about Picasso's work and how her class incorporated using verbs with abstract art.
Sierra's verbs are: jumping, watching, and crossing.
The lifeguard is watching the purple dolphin jumping in the water. The red bridge is for the people crossing the island.
On a recent trip to Memphis, Tennessee, I visited the Memphis Botanic Garden and The Dixon Gallery and Gardens. Both were fabulous places with wonderful plants (even if I was dripping with sweat after walking around them)!
The Memphis Botanic Garden is building a children's garden called "My Big Backyard." There is a PDF map of the plans here and information about the grand opening of the garden on August 1st, 2009, here. It promises to be whimsical and inspire new ways of interacting with plants! My photos from the MBG are in the slide show below.
I was not able to tour all of The Dixon gardens because I took so much time looking at the wonderful civil war exhibit inside the galleries. What I saw, however, was beautiful. Visitors are admitted to the galleries and gardens for free on Saturdays from 10 am to noon. Here are the photos I took there.
The Casey gardeners took a field trip to Fresh Way Produce at 6900 Old Canton Road in Ridgeland, Mississippi, on July 8, 2009. The Cockrell family owns and operates this market and has been in the produce business for over 40 years.
You can take a "virtual field trip" by viewing the photos from the market and reading their descriptions. If you click on the link, it will take you to a slide show on Flickr. By clicking anywhere on the photo, a description window will open. Let me know if you have trouble with this!
Everyone left the market with a new appreciation for the hard work of farmers, running a business, and yummy, fresh produce to eat! We learned about a Mississippi invention, local produce, and a teacher who now makes pickles for the market!
Below is the slide show of the field trip, but you can't see the photo descriptions unless you go directly to the Flickr set in the "virtual field trip" link above.
Our first tomato was ripe enough to harvest! This was a tomato plant that came up on its own from seeds left in the bed last year.
The milkweed pots were still bursting. The feathery seeds looked like white fire flames. The sweet potato vine is thriving in its home underneath the shade. I love the contrast of the bright green leaves with the dark green of the grass.
The dried beans that we planted last Wednesday were coming up in the small pots and in the bed with the corn! You can see the seeds hanging onto the sprout and the roots reaching out of the bottom of the pot. The zinnia seeds and lettuce leaf basil that we planted in small pots last week had also sprouted. The pumpkin seed still showed no signs of germination.
The purple flower belongs to the same beans that we planted and had sprouted above. Who could have imagined such beauty from a bean flower? I picked some flowers for a small arrangement in a plastic cup left over from germinating the squash seeds. The lettuce was withstanding the lack of rain, and a new tomato plant was blooming and bearing fruit.
There were so many things to see on July 1st including corn that continued to grow, a red pepper, a tiny spider and its web on the dill plant, and three more squash plants that a mystery person or persons planted since last week! Two families enjoyed watering and noticing all of the changes in the garden. Plus, we looked forward to eating a tomato and some beans fresh from the Casey garden with our suppers! See you next week.
The milkweed plants are fascinating. They developed seed pods that have been covered in little yellow bugs for weeks (yellow from the pollen?. . . aphids?). Yesterday, the first "new" thing I noticed about the garden was that the pods have started opening to reveal their feathery seeds. These feathers will work with the wind as transportation to carry the seeds to new places. Here is some information about milkweed seed propagation.
Mrs. Morgan brought some books and ideas to share with us. One of her favorite artists is Claude Monet who liked to paint gardens. You can learn more about him here. She also brought a calendar and showed us how she plans to record small amounts of information about the garden directly on her calendar in the squares for each day of the month. This is a good strategy to encourage observation and writing for people who may be intimidated or not have the time for writing longer journal-type entries, but it will also help us to remember important things we noticed about the garden's development. I could imagine that her calendar entry for yesterday might read, "we planted bean seeds that we harvested from a dried bean pod around our growing corn."
The photo above shows the color changes of these foot-long beans as they dry. The bean pod at the left was too dried up to eat, so we took the beans out to dry them. At first, they are light pink, but as they dry, they gradually turn to a deep purple-red to black. In this intense heat, we had beans drying at various stages. The black beans on the right are the are the beans we planted around our corn.
We watered, harvested cabbage and beans, pruned the basil and coleus, fed the turtles our discarded cabbage leaves and bean pods (which they began eating almost immediately), shared some books, marveled at the milkweed and corn growth, wished for the tomatoes to turn red, planted a squash seedling and watermelon plant started from seed, and planted some zinnia seeds, a pumpkin seed, and some lettuce-leaf basil in pots. We also planted some beans that were not dry and some dry beans to experiment and see if both will germinate or not. We predict that the dry beans will germinate but the wet ones will not.
Below is a slide show of my photos from the morning. We were a small crowd with only Mrs. Morgan, my son, and myself at first. Another family joined us later in the morning. Some of us started work at 8:30 am, and we didn't leave until 10:30 am! Working in the morning was definitely the way to go. In this heat wave, we could not have worked for nearly as long at noon.
We stopped by the garden to water and check on things. The garden group met this morning for the Tougaloo field trip, but my family was not able to go. Wow! We have corn that is 3 feet high, tomatoes growing plump, and beautiful containers. Some of the beds are a little too dry, and we have lost some plants and may be about to lose a few more to this heat wave. All but one of the sunflower seedlings dried up. The curry plant dried up a few weeks ago.
The beans, however, are doing great! We picked a large bunch and divided them between Mrs. Coleman and Mrs. Bennett. They will have a delicious addition to their supper tonight. Mrs. Coleman plans to saute hers.
This is a Flickr badge showing items in a set called Casey Elementary. Make your own badge here.
Casey's Arts Pledge
I pledge to learn everything I can about myself and the world around me through the arts and all other subjects. And I pledge to use my imagination to solve problems and to express my ideas because Casey is a creative arts school.
About Casey Elementary
Casey Elementary is an elementary school in the Jackson Public School District of Jackson, Mississippi. The mission of Casey Elementary School is to focus on student achievement by providing a challenging and engaging curriculum for a diverse, multiculutral student body. In doing so, Casey incorporates the art forms of music, dance, drama, and visual arts into the curriculum. Each student is challenged to develop and achieve essential academic skills, as well as an appreciation and understanding of their artistic surroundings, in order to become a successful, well-rounded, productive citizen. Casey is a Model Whole School of the Mississippi Arts Commission.
My name is Julie Owen. You may contact me at nolteowen@yahoo.com. I am a mother of two children in Jackson Public Schools, I work half-time as an elementary school librarian, and I am a volunteer arts education advocate. This blog reflects the voices of parents about arts integration. It is not meant to represent the views of Jackson Public Schools or of Casey Elementary.
I invite other parents, teachers, administrators, students, artists, and community members to comment or become official, posting members of this moderated blog.
