Wednesday 25th May 2016

What a busy gardening day we have had today! We started the morning with a competition to design a company logo and slogan for our ‘food for thought business’, Vegetables R us! The winning designs from Marly and Barnaby are very colourful and thoughtful! Jessica also came up with a superb slogan for our company using her knowledge of rhyme….

 

 

 

 

 

But the learning didn’t stop there! Before we could plant our lettuces today we needed to count them! As they were in trays 3x9, we had to use our knowledge of multiplication and arrays to work out how many lettuces we SHOULD have! Unfortunately several had been eaten so we then had to subtract a few.

Our next job was to estimate the spacing between our lettuces. The class decided to do this by drawing a circle to represent a fully grow lettuce. We then had to measure the circles diameter. Some of the year 4 pupils suggested we should then draw a square around our circle; we could then work out our spacing. Some of the class also worked out the perimeter of the square around each lettuce.

Still there was more maths! By measuring the beds, some of the year 4’s were able to work out how many lettuces we could grow by working out the area of the beds and dividing it by the area of each ‘lettuce square’.

I think you will agree, the whole class worked hard in their maths session today, yet everybody gave it 100% and were clearly enjoying the challenge of 'practical maths' using all the skills we have been learning in lessons.

                                            

Finally we set about planting our lettuces! Finally we stood back to admire our efforts. What a wonderful way to put: area, perimeter, multiplication, division and diameter all into a clear and meaningful context! By the end of the session there were even murmurs of; ‘that lesson was awesome’….the power of Veg!

We did find a few problems in the garden today! Firstly our courgettes looked very poorly compared with the second batch we set as seeds. We decided to replace the old courgettes with the new. This did give us a chance to did up the plants and try and work out what went wrong! We think that maybe they didn't get enough water. What do you think?

 

We had hoped to plant beetroot in one of the side beds today. When we started to dig, we noticed that the soil was VERY hard to turn over. That's when one of the children spotted the roots! They had 'taken over' the bed from a nearby tree. Can you see the dark blob on the photo on the left? This is a blob of fresh compost. The rest of the soil in the bed is so sandy and sticky, we don't think there will be any nutrients for our plants left in it! I think we are going to need some volunteers to dig it out and add fresh compost.





Finally we have a completed set of raised beds!!!