Today, my garden club for third, forth, and fifth graders will meet after school. We have two meetings in the month of May, instead of our usual single monthly meeting. On this first meeting, we typically weed the garden, turn over the soil to aerate it and loosen it up. If you read my post…
For the last 18 years, we’ve had a home fruit orchard. I can’t call it a backyard orchard as it was at our first home in the mid-west, as our 30 trees are in our front yard at our current house. It’s been so long that we’ve had fruit-growing in our yard, I really almost…
This morning I got some great news! Thirteen students who attend enrichment opportunities I offer at one of local elementary schools will have their Haiku poetry published in the Young American Poetry Digest for this year! Wow! Thirteen students! I have helped students to submit their poetry to this compilation for the last six years,…
Yesterday. Friday was Arbor Day. Friday, April 28th, yesterday, was Environmental Day at our school. Approximately 24 hours ago, 375 students visited with me in K-5 grade level groups for 35 minutes per grade level, at our local Elementary School, Evergreen Elementary, to hear me talk about the importance of Forests. Yes. I talked about…
via Daily Prompt: Roots At one time in my life, the word roots meant where you came from or what your ancestry happened to be. This was probably driven by that famous movie starring LaVar Burton as Kunte Kinte in Roots. Yes, I’m old enough to have watched that when it was released on television…
This semester I have learned a little about procrastination. Never considering myself to be one in the past, I can now claim the title of Procrastinator! Since this is really not something to brag about, and I’d like to return to my pre-procrastinator state, I thought I’d share some of my observations. It’s easier…
Yesterday I drove I -35, otherwise known as The Great River Road that runs parallel to the Mighty Mississippi and divides the state borders of Minnesota and Iowa with Wisconsin. There was a time in my life that I thought I would never see Bald Eagles or even Great Blue Herons other than the one…
If you’ve ever taken a statistics course, you’ve been warned about these. Outliers can throw your data off. If you’ve ever looked at a bell curve, you’ve seen a graphical representation of these – data points at either of the far ends of the scale. If you’ve ever read Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, you’ve read…
Friday, my boys were off from school for the Easter holiday break. About mid-afternoon, I looked out our back window and saw a white patch in a tree at the edge of the field behind us. The landscape is slowly greening up but the trees have not leafed out yet so seeing something pure white…