The importance of local

After breakfast and journaling, we went outside to work in the garden. There is always something to do out there! Our hard work is starting to show as we see the tomatoes, carrots, peppers, strawberries, and other plants starting to get bigger...even bigger than they were just last week!

When our gardening was done, we went to the front of the school to work in the flower beds near the main entrance of the school. We pulled weeds, trimmed bushes, and planted many pretty flowers like hostas. It is a good feeling to know that we are making our school look better all the time.

After cleaning up and enjoying a snack, we played a game. Mr. Johnson gave half of us tiny marshmallows and half of us pieces of spaghetti. We also got post-it notes that represented money. We could buy more marshmallows and spaghetti from each other or from Mr. Johnson. In fact, Mr. Johnson sold them to us at a lower cost. He said that we represented the local people and he represented the big store. That's why he could sell them to us cheaper. Here is a video that shows what we did.



Our goal was to build the tallest building we could using those materials. But since no one had all the materials to start with, we had to buy from each other and Mr. Johnson. At the end, some of us had buildings that stood and others did not. But the real lesson came when Mr. Johnson showed us that he, the big store, had all of the money! He showed us how when we buy locally, the money and the jobs stay in our local area. But the big store is owned by someone who doesn't even live here and so all of the money left our local area, or "economy". We all agreed that buying locally whenever we can is better than buying from a big name store.

After lunch and silent reading, we all wrote thank you notes to Mrs. Gardner for the dirt pudding and juice she brought us last week. It was very tasty!

Tomorrow, we are taking a field trip to a local restaurant. Check our blog tomorrow to see pictures and read all about it!

Service and Learning

We started the day with a great discussion of plants again. There are so many things to learn about plants! Later this week, we are going on a field trip to a place that uses plants that are grown locally. That will be fun!


Today we finished up at the house of the Grandpa of one of our students. We got a lot planted yesterday, but today we did the edging and added some wood chips.

We came back, cleaned up, and starting working on our memory book. Mr. Gettig showed us a website where you can build a picture book and add your own stories. We thought about the adventures we have already had in Garden Camp and started to put them together as story pages in our book. When the book is done, we will all get a copy of it to remember this summer by.

Speaking of books, the nice people from Kazoo Books came by and brought us three big stacks of books that are related to our summer program and our Magnet school theme. Because they looked for all of these books just for us, now the nice people at Kazoo Books understand better what we are learning at Edison and will let us know if they see more books that would be good for us!

After lunch and reading, we had another great lesson from Mr. Johnson and Miss Smith. They are great teachers and keep our attention. They really make learning about plants fun!

We finished the day with a snack and listening to our book being read to us. Tomorrow, we will learn more about plants we eat and why it is good to eat locally grown food.