Garden Planter STEM Challenge for Spring

STEM Challenge for Spring: Garden Planter Box

A math-intensive STEM challenge that can be useful when planning out a school or home garden.

Practical Skills with STEM

Why try this challenge? In addition to creating something that is useful, students will be honing their spacial reasoning and mathematics skills while designing and creating their garden box. It may even inspire your students to create a full sized garden bed where they can plant their favorite flowers, plants, or vegetables.

Gather Materials for Garden Planter STEM

First, gather all materials needed for the challenge:

You can use items like card stock, paper, and tape, or have students use building bricks or blocks. If you want to have them make a scale model, set a scale for them that make sense based on the materials you have. You can even procure seed packets or find directions online for the appropriate spacing of their seedlings and how many they can fit in their box.

Go Deeper with Math in this STEM Challenge

Have your students explore using a fixed set of materials. Is there an optimal configuration to support the number of seedlings and garden planter box size? Are there configurations that would make more sense in real life? A square is the most efficient area you can get with a fixed perimeter, but would that make it difficult to rid the garden box of weeds or harvest vegetables? These are all considerations your students can think about.

What skills do students work on? In addition to following the Engineering Design Process to complete this challenge, they will see that math is important and helpful outside the classroom, as well as work together with patience and perseverance.

Add more rigor into this activity with the STEM challenge resource (or get the pack of Spring STEM challenges) on Teachers pay Teachers:

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STEM Challenge for Fall - Acorn Chute

Fun STEM Challenge for Fall: Design and Create an Acorn Chute

What a fun STEM challenge for kids! This challenge takes the idea of a roller coaster or slide to a new level because kids are working with non-uniform shapes.

First, gather up the materials:

You can have students gather fallen acorns or use craft acorns. In a pinch, you can substitute small balls or marbles, but one thing that makes this challenge unique is that the acorns don't roll as well as a perfect sphere. This is a great activity to discuss force and motion as well as friction and 3D shapes.

What skills do students work on? In addition to following the Engineering Design Process to complete this challenge, they will need to explore structural stability, repeatability, and will spend a good deal of time making modifications to get their chutes to work predictably.

Add more rigor into this activity with the STEM challenge resource (or get the pack of fall STEM challenges) on Teachers pay Teachers:

Autumn in New England!

Autumn is my favorite season by far. Unfortunately it never lasts long enough for me; winter always comes too soon! I don't mind winter, but I would be perfectly happy to have half as much winter weather and twice as much fall weather! The fall foliage is really pretty this year. Here's a photo from our morning walk at a nearby cranberry bog:

Where's your favorite place to go for a nature walk?

Wacky Zoo - Reuse Old Magazine to Create Fun New Animals

Create a Unique Zoo with Old Magazines

Nerd joke: What do you get when you cross a monkey and an elephant? Monkey Elephant sin θ. (More on the cross product of vectors here). This is a fun and easy project even your little ones will love! Combine animals in your imagination and then bring them to life to exhibit a wacky zoo.

How to Make your Wacky Zoo

Cut out portions of animals, glue them onto a colorful background, and draw the rest of the animal. Here are some of the animals we created.

How do you like to reuse old magazines?

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week in review: spring is here!

From top left, and clockwise: Finishing a 1000 piece puzzle, the start of soccer season, nature walk (4), playground fun, seedlings growing!

Three other exciting things started this week:

1) Chess class! All 3 of my boys (husband and two kids) are participating. They have learned the fried liver attack.
2) Tennis club! The local homeschoolers will meet weekly to learn how to play tennis. I volunteered to lead the 6-9 year olds and our first class was a blast.
3) Baseball! My 6yo is playing baseball as well as soccer. Almost 8yo has tried both soccer and baseball but decided they aren't for him, so I'm hoping he likes tennis. It's nice to have a sport you love.

We are quite busy, but the weather is warmer and the daylight hours are longer, which makes it a bit more manageable.

Leaf Relief Art Project

Fall Leaf Art Project

I have been wanting to do this project with the kids ever since reading about it over at Cassie Stephens's blog. We love to do leaf rubbings with crayons every autumn, but this was such a fun new twist, I just couldn't wait to set it up! Yesterday we had unusually warm weather, so we went on a long walk and gathered leaves as we walked. What a rarity to walk around in November without even a sweatshirt or hat on! I think it was 65F but it felt at least 10 degrees warmer with the strong sun! Luckily I already had spray adhesive, spray paint, and very fine steel wool on hand, so all I needed to do was find something to mount the leaves to! I ended up using cardboard, which seemed to work just fine.

After our walk, the kids ate ice cream on the deck while I gathered materials. Then we got to work! After putting on the aluminum foil and rubbing:

Aluminum Foil and Spray Paint Leaf Art!

I spray painted them outside. It was fast-drying paint and was dry within 15 minutes, but we still waited overnight for the next step.

Here's my big kid working on his. He was very excited!

Here's my little kid being his usual silly self. =)

strawberry stats

Strawberry stats so far
Days picking: 10
Number of strawberries picked: 676
Weight of strawberries picked: 7480g, or 16.49lb

The kids and I harvest from our garden each morning, count and weigh what we pick, and enter it into a chart. It's a great long term project for them, and useful for my gardening geekiness as well! This is how we kick off our gardening season: with strawberries. We also pick spinach and lettuce as well, but a basket of leaves isn't nearly as pretty as a basket of strawberries! We are likely at the peak of harvest for the first crop of strawberries (these are primarily everbearing strawberries) and we will miss them sorely when they are gone. 

earth day pointillism

I recently posted about exploring pointillism with rainbows, and with Earth Day coming soon I thought I would share. Print out a line drawing of earth here, dip a new pencil eraser into various shades of green and blue paint, there is our beautiful blue planet!

This would be even prettier cut out and mounted on black paper.

I have included this project as part of my Earth Helpers unit, great for Earth Day or any time you are looking for activities to celebrate our planet:

This resource also includes a fun tri-hexaflexagon activity I know your kids will love! You can read more about it by clicking the image below:

spring has sprung!

Nearly all of the snow is gone. We had a great winter, full of sledding, shoveling, and snowmen. I am so glad spring is upon us, though, because that means that garden fruit and vegetables will be here soon! Yesterday we sowed the first of the golden yellow snow peas as well as spinach and strawberry spinach. Inside, I have some tomatoes, tomatillos, and herbs started, and greens for munching on while we wait for spring to really kick in. This is what the yellow peas looked like last year:

It will be awhile before we are tasting their delightfully sweet crunch, but in the meantime we have plenty to do! Before dropping in seeds, we needed to till under the overwintering cover crop, rye:

I have planted hairy vetch as well but it didn't thrive like the rye did. We added compost as well. You can see the compost bins in the background here:

Above you can see where we cleaned up the blueberry patch. The kids fed and watered them. They helped feed our shrubs and bulbs out front as well as move compost around. I am so glad they know where so much of their food comes from and that we have the space to have a fairly extensive garden. We get to observe the life cycle of plants from seed to fruit, and then save the seeds again for the next year. We also get to watch the compost break down food scraps we can't use. I hope that when H&F grow up, they will have gardens to share with their own children.

It sure felt hot after so many hours of yard work, so I brought the kids out a treat:

Each year I try to grow something new and take a break from something else I've grown before. There will always be lots of herb; this year I am adding lime basil to the mix. In addition, I'll have the usual oregano, lemon basil, sweet basil, mint, thyme, sage, rosemary, lemon balm, dill, and possibly marjoram. I am growing strawberry spinach for the first time this year and ordered a new winter squash as well. Hopefully the squash vine borers will find someone else's garden to attack this year, but if not, I will have to deal with them as well. There will be June, yellow, and everbearing strawberries, tomatoes and tomatillos in many, many varieties, summer and winter squash, greens, radishes, and maybe brassicas again. I split the rhubarb off yesterday so hopefully that will grow happily. I am not going to grow beans or corn this year, and might skip carrots and parsnips as well. What will be growing in your garden?

man vs nature

Is it a natural resource or a man made resource? This was a question we covered recently in one of our homeschooling study units. The topic had me wondering about the intersection of man and nature that we often see on walks. It can be so beautiful to witness the initial, or primary, interaction, before it moves on to something unrecognizable as one or the other. Generally it is man manipulating nature, though we have had more and more of the opposite in terms of weather in recent years! Here are a few pictures from recent walks of man making a mark on nature:

What are your favorite spots to see man's gentle impact on nature?

bark painting

Hurricane Sandy was a disaster for so many people in the northeast US, but we were lucky enough this year to avoid the issues we encountered with last year's storm. We didn't lose power (yay!) and since we had our two giant maple trees removed following last year's storm, there were no branches falling toward my head or through our roof, as they did last year (bigger yay!). Only two fence panels and small branches (<10ft long) fell. During yard cleanup, the kids and I found several large pieces of bark, so I put them on the deck to dry out. We used Q-tips and large brushes to paint:

Our finished pieces.

H painting his space themed bark.

He wanted to add glitter. There is glitter in space. Duh.

Just wish we had more bark to paint!

exploring clouds

We did this cloud project a couple of months ago and it is something that has really stuck with the boys. They often point out "serious" (cirrus) clouds, which always makes me smile. I think that making clouds with cotton balls is such a fun way to learn about them!

First we made a mini book about clouds with this Clouds Mini Helper (free when I did it, not sure it will stay that way!). We also read a this cute book we found at the library" Clouds (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science 1) and talked about the atmosphere and water cycle. The fun part was making clouds! We used blue paper for a background and then played with the cotton balls into the shapes we wanted.

Clouds Mini Helper

Cloud types

Clouds are fun!

Hanging clouds

Close up view