Potato Harvest in Pre-K

Last time we talked about how to garden with pre-k students, focusing specifically on potatoes. Now you get to see how we harvested the potatoes and used them in the classroom. I'm only showing the math lessons, but there are a bazillion other ways to incorporate those potatoes into your teaching once they're out of the ground. Yes, a bazillion!

To harvest our potatoes, I used a shovel to loosen the soil enough for the children to dig in with their bare hands. Gardening gloves can certainly come in handy, but I love getting the soil all over my own hands when in the garden so I share that experience with my students. Feel free to use the gloves! The children then just dug around until they felt they'd found all the potatoes. Some pulled out one, shouted in excitement, and were done for the day. Others sat around raking their fingers through the soil for the entire time the rest of the class was at recess.

We waited as long as we could to harvest to give the potatoes as much time to grow as possible. We dug them up the Friday before the last week of school. The plants had not yet flowered and the leaves weren't dead, but there wasn't any more time to wait. You can tell from the pictures that they could have stood to stay in the ground for much longer! The only thing that happens when you harvest too early is that the potatoes are smaller- in some cases MUCH smaller! We were still able to donate these potatoes to a local food pantry and I'm sure someone got a kick out of receiving tiny potatoes. If we'd had more I would have either made a potato dish in the classroom or let children take potatoes home. The potatoes we received were part of a service-learning project so they were destined for the food pantry from the beginning.

We pulled the potatoes out later that day during math. Oh, the possibilities! First, we counted the potatoes. We estimated how many there would be before counting and were all waaaaaay off! We ended up with 60 potatoes.

Next we sorted them by size. We decided to sort by small, medium, or large. Since they were not uniform in size, it was interested seeing the children decide which fit into each category.

After that I posed a question: Which size has the most potatoes? We discussed how we could determine this and decided to graph the potatoes. This is just a simple graph made by lining the potatoes up on the carpet (did I mention it was the Friday before the last week of school?!).

Another thing we did which I did not take picture of was to do a final journal entry of our findings. We'd done plenty of writing about the potatoes throughout the semester. One example is to predict how many potatoes they think are growing under the ground. Their incredibly low predictions crack me up- they were all shocked to find so many potatoes!

So there you have it, a few ideas to use to integrate gardening into your regularly scheduled math lessons. There are dozens upon dozens of other things to be done, of course, but did I mention it was the Friday before the last day of school? :) 

Construction Theme

We just finished up a month-long construction theme in my classroom. Here are some things we did to learn more about one of my favorite subjects- building stuff! I would say these are some of the "highlights" but really they're just the "things I managed to photograph."

We talked about the parts of buildings and structures and the children drew and labeled houses. They've been working on drawing houses basically all year, so most of them turned out pretty well. We do a LOT of labeling and it's a great way to add some print to any type of drawing or art project. This project was done in a small group with my assistant. This child is in a group who is working on writing and reading syllables. (Notice the hobbit-like windows of this house.)

One week was devoted to learning about tools, so we made a graph of our favorite tools. It's important to me that my students get plenty of vocabulary in English as well as Spanish, so I make sure to include as many thematic activities as possible during math (which is taught in English). For this graph the children drew a picture of their favorite tool and copied the word. When the children make the graph themselves they are much more likely to utilize the graph during centers and at other times of the day. I hung this graph in our construction center and they counted and compared the tools to their little hearts' contents.

Here are some closeups of some of the individual tools. We've worked hard on learning to draw this year and I'm very proud of what they're able to do now that we're 2/3 through the year.

Also during our week on tools was this ever-so-fancy project I've decided to call "draw, color, label, and cut." I got the idea from a colleague and discovered there's really nothing you can't draw, color, label, and cut. This activity is great for a bulletin board or other display and gets the kids excited about labeling and cutting (because they're just not excited enough about scissors already, right?).

By the way, I highly recommend giving your students interesting tools that they can actually use, like levels and tape measures. Every year my students L-O-V-E using levels with the blocks and end up checking random objects around the room to see if they are level or not.


Here are a few more random activities from the construction month.

Nuts and bolts

Locks and keys (hey, it's construction-y!)

Toy screws and hinges, which just happen to fit perfectly on the backs of our shelves

So there you have it, a bunch of jumbled ideas for learning about construction. Next up will be transportation, and I will be more mindful about taking photographs this time!