Now, on first thoughts, you might not think you could learn much from an upcoming house inspection. And, in truth, I’m a bit peeved we have a house inspection since we’ve only been in the bloody house for 2 months!
But, well, it is a good reminder to do a bit of gardening and tidy up, and doing the garden now will hopefully prevent it getting too crazy over the winter.
So we’ve started a bit of clean up. We have a few more days, but there’s plenty more to do…raking leaves, cutting down weeds, sweeping, etc.
Kai’s been helping out with the clean up, when he’s felt like it, although ‘helping’ should be considered a relative term here, since running around with two palm fronds pretending they’re swords doesn’t always seem to be so much help!!
And, as with any activity (if you look at it that way!), the opportunity to do a lot in the garden has provided us with the opportuntiy to learn a whole lot of botanical stuff….such as….
*We’ve found lots of little bugs and creepy crawlies in the leaf litter – spurring on a discussion about detritivores and how they break down the leaf litter and turn it into soil. We also collected some for Brett’s lizards to eat!
*We’ve investigated what lives in the compost bin and how they break down the compost…especially the leopard slugs (which give me the heebie-jeebies!)!
*We found lots of seeds and seed casings, and last night we also watched a doco which talked about how animals can be pollinators and seed dispersers, so we’ve talked about how plants spread their seeds and pollen…by wind, animal, etc, and how it is a total environmental disaster if a plant loses it’s key pollinator or disperser for some reason…
*Pulling out weeds, we talked about what is a weed, and what’s an invasive or introduced species, and why they are a problem.
And also Kai’s been happy to help, of his own accord, because he knows the house inspection is something that affects the whole family and he wants to help to tidy up – no forcing, coercion or blackmail required!
We’re playing along with Owlet and Unschool Monday…
I love when awesome little learnings happen along the way. Sounds like fun :) Have you read that awesome book Leaf Litter? We’ve been enjoying it all over again.
Lovely! Your “educationese” is excellent! As always, we are following in your footsteps! I even downloaded a “mini beasts Hunt “worksheet” the other week!
he he – we’ll see if it’s still fun tomorrow!!
I haven’t heard of Leaf Litter Lauren, sounds fun – i’ll see if the library have it…
Messyfish – a mini beast hunt sounds awesome! I hope you don’t find any leopard slugs – our compost is full of them, they really do give me the creeps…(and i’m pretty hard to creep out with bugs and stuff!!).
We WERE learning so much in our garden… until the mosquitoes came! I hope that we can get rid of them soon so that we can get back out there!
What a great “field trip” to the garden :)
Lovely. Not sure what’s wrong with Leopard slugs though. We have heaps of them here and we all love them.
Jade – yeah, nothing wrong with them exactly – i just don’t much like slugs! They are quite pretty as slugs go though!
Mandy – oh, i sympathise – when we lived in the tropics, our garden was a no-go area for whole of the wet season…it was flooded, full of cane toads, and a mozzie haven!