Our first garden nutrition class had students in 3rd grade harvest, clean, chop, and cook fresh student grown bok choy.

Ingredients:

• Bok Choy 3-6 small heads
• Fresh ginger, 1tsp grated or chopped
  
• quinoa
  
• shoyu
  
• oil
  

Prepare quinoa according to package directions. You can use a rice cooker, usually 1 cup quinoa to 2 cups water.

Harvest and clean bok choy. Peel off outer leaves that are yellowed, speckled, or wilted. Cut off the end of the bok choy to remove the hard bottom stem. Now, separate the good leaves from the stalk to wash the dirt off the bok choy. Add your leaves to the salad spinner to rinse and dry. You can leave the heart intact with the baby leaves.
Wash and dry your bok choy.
Chop your bok choy into small pieces, about a 1/4-1/2 in wide.
Grate some fresh ginger to add. You will need about one

Get your pan or wok ready.

This week in garden our K, 1 & 2 students sampled garden pesto pasta.

Garden Basil Pesto:
This recipe should nicely cover 1-2 pounds of pasta.

• 3 cups packed fresh basil
• 3-8 large kale leaves, destemmed
  
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 tablespoon red wine vinegar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
  
• 1 clove of garlic
• 1 inch piece of Parmesan cheese (optional)
• Dash of black pepper

Optional Ingredients:

• Most any garden greens can be added to your pesto, like parsley or  swiss chard.
  
• 1/8 c ground Parmesan cheese or 1 inch piece of Parmesan block
• Nuts can be added, like walnuts will make a rich pesto, Macadamia will make the richest pesto
  

To make the pesto, first remove basil stems and kale stems and wash to remove any dirt, rocks, or sand. To wash, you can fill a big bowl with water and your leaves with room for the leaves move around. Drain and dry basil in a salad spinner or in some clean kitchen towels.

Take all ingredients and transfer to a high powered blender. Blend for 30 seconds to one minute. You can also use a food processor or even chop by hand. Chopping by hand will make a chunkier pesto.

Toss hot or cold pasta with pesto sauce until desired. Extra pesto can be refrigerated for 3 days or frozen for later use.

This blog will be the new home of garden news for 2016-2017. Stay tuned for updates on our beautiful space!

Kindergarten is starting to understand that the keyboard is not in alphabetical order. With a little encouragement, each student was able to fill in some features of a common keyboard.

After they finished their Blank Keyboard students went on a typing challenge called Keyboard Climber from TVO Kids. This site is perfect for first grade, and difficult but doable for Kindergarten. I have found some of my favorite computer activities from TVO Kids. The main site is heavy with content, but they provide excellent resources for younger ages to practice computer skills.

I hope all of our students have a great weekend! Enjoy!

-Miss Force

Aloha Grades 3, 4 and 5.

Here are the instructions for the logo project:

1) Open SumoPaint:
2) Create your personal logo using the tools on SumoPaint
Logo Examples:

Now, it's 8:00 am and the bell has just rang. You are standing at the front of the class and everyone is looking at you. What do you do?

Students had a lot of fun ideas about what they would do in class. Some had extra special field trips flying to Greenland and then swimming with sharks. Others had a serious approach, asking their class to finish work at top speed with at least 75% accuracy. "Whoa! So tough!" exclaimed a few while our 'teacher' read her lesson plan. I loved the range of ideas and I was glad to see some of my students reach outside the box. "We would play flag football all day." said one student. "For seven hours?" I replied.

I plan on integrating more graphic design and editing to mix up coursework.  At the same time, we will keep typing in order to help kids stay on track for when testing comes around.

Have a great weekend- Fishing, the beach, sleepovers, birthdays, and more! See you next week!

1st grade did a great job trying to copy all of the symbols and letters. I am very proud of Kindergarten for doing a great job trying to write a lot of letters and symbols that are unfamiliar. After this both classes worked on Key Seeker. This is an excellent site for children still uncomfortable with the location of letters on the keyboard. Although, some students in 1st grade told me this site was too easy !

After this we went on our all-time favorite site, This is Sand. 1st grade had to type it in themselves. Kindergarten tried the game for the first time and loved it.

I hope everyone has a great fall break next week!

This is a great project because it gives students a chance to use a word processor for a fun and creative project. After

Grade 3 wrote letters to Bella from India and to Zach from Greenland.
Grade 4 wrote to a student from either Mexico or Chine
Grade 5 selected the country. Students chose places like France, Ireland, Vietnam, and Argentina.

A lot of students asked what kind of food their pen pal ate and asked if their pen pal enjoyed his or her home country.

Great job to all my classes for their creative thinking and interesting questions.

Welcome back to computer class! Today we had grades K and 1 in class learning and revisiting some of our favorite sites.

K then went on to Bees and Honey, a game to show them how to use the mouse and learn how to click. After that we checked in on two other mouse-ercise games, Koalas to the Max and Pollock Art.

Grade 1 was ready to go and worked on skills we learned last year.

• Opening a browser- Firefox or Safari
  
• Typing in a link
  
• Searching and selecting the correct link
  
• Going to the correct website
  

Students went to Minimouse and their all time favorite, This is Sand.


Have a great weekend!!