Potatoes and Acorns!!!

Always something happening at Glamorgan Kindergarten!

While puppet making still dominates the children's interest, there are some little pockets of children exploring in other areas.

Harvesting potatoes!!!

Our outdoor area continues to provide opportunities for exploration, such as planting potatoes!

 

What a wonderful find! 

Dale and this small group of children dug deep into the bag full of rich soil to find lots of new potatoes!

 

Just enough to cook up, add a little butter and sample their taste 

 

Chrissy showed the children at mat-time how many potatoes where collected, all the varieties of shapes and sizes.

 

The next day the potatoes were washed thoroughly...

 

 

Look at that...   A whole pot full !

 

 

Then at morning tea, the potatoes were cooked and served.

Unfortunately no photos were taken of the actual eating... sorry about that!

But we had a lot of children saying how much they loved eating our potatoes.

 

 

Maintenance is an on-going job at Kindergarten

 

Given that we have such a spectacular Oak Tree at our Kindergarten, we also have millions and millions of acorns, sprouting and growing through our gardens and all over the wild area.

As you can imagine, if we did not pick out the acorn seedlings we would eventually grow an Oak Tree Forest!

 

 

Riley and Joshua have been very willing helpers for Dale, digging up fallen leaves and picking out acorns.

 

The boys are hard at work!

Riley is a dab hand with a spade.

 

And the following week....

 

Jorja prepares a bucket for her acorn collecting

Toby shows us how many he has collected.

Liam's spade comes in handy for digging up the acorns 

Wow Jorja, a full bucket!

Liam examines the roots that have sprouted from the acorn seed

Reece is busy on the job

Annabelle has picked a great specimen showing what has grown from the seedling...

and we discovered just how difficult they are to pull out of the ground.

Wow Ryan that is a lot of acorn collecting

 

This group, our Garden Maintenance Crew, led by Dale and Chrissy  worked for 2 weeks to pick out all the acorns... its amazing how many seedlings had sprouted.

 

Our children are learning that it is important to care for, maintain and respect our natural environment.   There was also an opportunity to talk to the children about Paptuanuku (the earth mother) and Tane (the guardian of the forest) who clothed his mother with all the trees, birds and insects who live in our natural environment. Papatuanuku was holding on very tight to some of those acorns because we had to tug and dig very very hard to get them out. 

Thank you to all our wonderful helpers!

 

Documented by Leanne