Soil Paint
Why is soil important? Think about it…without soil there wouldn’t be plants. Without plants we couldn’t breathe, we would all live in houses that were flimsy or fall down (no wooden structure), the cows couldn’t eat…no cheeseburgers and so much more! Today I visited Lacey Spring Elementary to teach students about the importance of soil. After a quick lesson on soil-students were able to “paint” with different types of soil (clay vs sandy soil). This activity allows students to see that not all soil is alike…I give them several different colors of soil to paint with.
4-H curriculum on soil is available to all grades! Older students still love to soil paint but also enjoy taking a soil sample outside of the school, creating a soil shake, and putting together a soil profile with construction paper. Contact Rosemary to learn more!
Worm Casting Harvest
At Linville Edom Elementary School you can walk into the 3rd grade classroom and not realize that they have “pets”. There is no smell or loud commotion coming from their pets….that’s because they have WORMS! That’s right-there are about 1,000 worms living in a worm bin located in the corner away from the windows. I decided to start this project with Linville because the school had a strong gardening program and a beautiful garden located behind the school. We didn’t want to spray the garden with any chemicals but still wanted to be able to fertilize the plants. Solution? Worm castings (poop)! Worm castings are an excellent source of fertilizer for your garden or plants. Plus-they eat your unwanted garbage! If the worm bin is properly taken care of there is not a trace of smell. After 3-5 months your worms will have decomposed everything in your bin to provide a nice array of worm castings. There is a sorting process of putting food in the bin above so the worms force themselves to move up and out of the castings but not all worms make it! Therefore, we had to dumb the castings out and sort through the piles to pick out the worms. Worms found were then placed back into the bin to continue eating garbage. The castings are now ready for plant application! Our castings were ready but our garden isn’t! Therefore, we simply placed our worm casting harvest into plastic containers and will wait until spring to apply to the garden.
Interested in learning more about worms? Contact Rosemary to learn more!
ROCKETS!
I love when we are teaching students STEM without them even knowing it because they are having so much fun! Using the 4-H curriculum guide Rockets to the Rescue is an easy way to do this! Participants are given materials to create their own rocket-but no instructions on specifics of the design. May sound a little daunting huh? Nope! These kids LOVED creating their own rocket by design and were making friends with their partners that they had never met. The final test was to see if their rocket could launch 20ft away into a hula hoop (the target). They were given a test run and if their design didn’t seem to work they were back to the drawling table to redesign! Interested in learning more about Rockets to the Rescue? Contact me!
*This was a workshop that I helped with for the Augusta County 4-H Program
