Grade 2 nature block: gardening and insects

Our last lesson block for second grade was focused on gardening and insects.  I was hoping to spend most of the month actually putting in our garden, but between all the rain and just not getting around to it like I hoped, it didn't happen.  I've made more progress in the few days since we got out of school than I have in the previous month.

The last month of school is serious burnout time, so we made this as simple as possible.  I asked Sariah which insects she wanted to learn about and went from there.  I didn't guide any of the drawings, but let her do pretty much what she wanted.  She made "fact pages" about each insect and used field guides to draw fairly accurate pictures of each one.

I found the book Among the Meadow People, which is available free on www.mainlesson.com to be a perfect resource for this block, as it had engaging stories that also taught about the habits of each insect.  Next time I might just make a whole block based on this book, as it also had things about frogs, turtles, and other animals.  There are other books with titles such as Among the Forest people that would also be perfect to use for nature blocks.

Ant at work

Life cycle of a hieroglyphic flat butterfly.

She and I collaborated to model insects and flowers.

One thing that was really awesome was that it seemed like almost every insect we studied magically appeared in our yard the very day we learned about it.  We found a huge ant hill and had fun observing that.  The day we learned about lady bugs and aphids, we suddenly had tons of aphids around.  And the day we learned about butterflies, the children found this injured butterfly, which they took care of for a day until it recovered and flew away:

Preston was so sweet; when he saw the white butterfly on the grass, he said gently, "Aw, she looks just like an angel."  And so she did.   (I kind of think Preston is the one who accidentally injured the poor creature in the first place; he's the one who brought it to us...)

Sariah finished the purse she'd been working on since before Christmas.  We just need to shorten the straps, and it will be perfect.

The main reason I wanted to do a block on gardening was so I could use the wonderful idea I read in Else Gottgen's book Waldorf Education in Practice for teaching punctuation: the Workers in the Garden of Words:

Each day I introduced another character with a story and picture, then the next day we named the character.

Mr. Period is the gatekeeper who stops the visitors going into the garden.

Mrs. Question Mark is always confused and has to keep asking questions about what she is doing.

Miss Comma is a chatterbox who can never stop talking, that is why her symbol helps keep all those words in order.

Mr. Exclamation Point is the one who gets most excited about his work and likes to bark orders to the others.

Sariah LOVED this.  I overheard her telling friends about the characters.  I know they will stick in her head.

Lastly, just a couple of random pictures of my little lawn-mowers: