Hoping for a sunflower scoop!

Day 25 SOL19

Our students have been planting sunflower seeds in our small school garden.

We are of course, surrounded by farmers planting rice paddy, corn (maize) and all sorts of vegetables all year round. Most of our students’ families grow at least some of their own food, but it’s somehow different to be able to engage the whole school, a class at a time, in something as rewarding and fulfilling as planting seeds and watching what happens next.

Seeds are planted!

They’ve sprouted!

Now to water and weed!

Unfortunately they won’t get much bigger than this before my month of slicing is over, but I am hoping they continue to grow well, despite the unseasonally dry weather we are experiencing at the moment. I’m also thinking about all the writing possibilities for each class, to ‘relive the moment’, through narrative description, or an informative recount or even to find some way of turning these sunflowers into a story with a plot!

I never cease to marvel at how one can bury a tiny nondescript seed in the ground and out springs life, with all its delicate stems and leaves reaching for the sky and drinking in the rain and sun, just exactly what the textbooks tell us will happen!

The anticipation, the sense of the unknown, will it, won’t it, sprout, then a few characters (seedlings) emerge in a show off, blustery way, while some are shy and barely visible and others just shrug and plod along a leaf at a time. Then the plot unfolds to the climax when they finally bloom!