The final presentations!

All of our groups uploaded their presentations today and I am a very proud teacher!

Check them out below!

The Garden Gangsters!

The Green Bunch!

The Green Gardeners!

The Evergreen team!

The Garden Buds!

Make sure to leave them some feedback on their blog!

A few final activities

Children have been busy filling in their assessment rubrics. Children are grading their work in 5 areas of the presentation!

Two great pieces of art arrived in today! Firstly, Ciara brought in a project that she has been working on with her dad for the past few weeks. They recycled an old skateboard and donated it to our school as a pretty unique plant holder! Ciara's plan is to paint it white and get all of the class to sign it. What a lovely idea Ciara. Thanks also to Ciara's dad for all of his help!

We'll post some photographs of the finished product when we its ready!

Christianah was chatting with her sister who donated some art she has created for her Junior Cert art portfolio. How lovely would this look on the walls close to the school garden? Thanks Christianah! 

Uploading our final presentations!

The wait is almost over! Final touches are being put on our presentations and all movies will be uploaded by today! Some have already been uploaded so check them out on the team blogs. Leave feedback for all of the teams after watching their video! Check back later for more updates :) Good luck everyone!

Mr. Curtin

Great work this week everyone!

I'm so proud of you all. Have a great weekend and I look forward to presentation day next week!

Mr. Curtin

P.S. Check out Ms. McGrath's blog and leave a comment! There have amazing ideas for our new library!

Ms. McGrath's Library Lounge!

Super blogs!

Some teachers looked through our blogs today as we finish the final few parts of our presentations. The feedback was amazing! Make sure you all check out the 5 fantastic blogs we have created in our blogs section and don't forget to comment :)

Thank you for this handy tip!

As the end comes in to sight for all our teams, everyone is working hard working all of their ideas into the final presentation. I'm so proud of everyone!
Some children expressed worry that there may not be enough time to incorporate all of their ideas in to the photostory but I don't want anyone to worry. Mr. McGorman has promised to look at all of our blogs too before making his final decision.

A very useful tip was offered up by one team today. Why not illustrate some slides of your photostory with pages from the blog itself? Using the print screen icon and pasting a screen shot into Paint will help you with this. Just use paint to crop your screen shot and save your file as a jpeg! This can be inserted in to your photostory without any bother! Good luck to all of our great teams. If you have any problems or questions feel free to email me!

Very exciting news!

I almost forgot to tell you all - I downloaded the app Jitesh made on to my phone! Thanks to Sam for taking the photo. Now I can check your blog at all times and see all of your great ideas.

Jennifer and Sam - I'll be downloading your apps next! :) 

Some final preparations

The final pieces of our presentation are coming together nicely! We took time today to look back at our assignment rubric and see tick off all of the requirements for our final presentation. I'm glad to we are on our way to including all of these in our final presentation!

Loads of our members are busy putting the final pieces of the presentation together and collaborating well! Check out some photos of today's progress in the Progress section of the blog. As always, take them to use on your own blogs!

Great collaboration today!

What a productive day! App making, game creation, garden mapping, currency conversion and sound recording - we had a lot going on! I have uploaded loads of photos from the day and some detail about our progress on the Progress section. Make sure to check them out and use on your own blogs!

 

Kevins dad has a great company and Kevin shared it with the class. Definitely a great option for our school garden. Water charges will be expensive so we need to be mindful of keeping our costs down! Thanks for sharing Kevin. Great idea!

Vegetable Water

Hey guys, This is Sam updating Mr. Curtin's blog for him. So as you may have seen over on the Garden Gangsters blog, I found out that when you boil vegetables, the water you boiled them in is actually better for your plants than rainwater! So we decided to try it out.
Jitesh brought in a bottle of water that had been used to boil sweetcorn and we watered some seeds that we sowed yesterday. We told Séanna, our school caretaker, and he thought the idea was really cool, especially with the new water charges coming in. He's going to water all of the indoor plants with it!

I wonder...

Some one in the class told me that there are certain times of the day that are better for watering plants. Does anyone know the best time? Could anyone tell me why this is?

Check out the photos from todays experiments!

There are lots of photos now uploaded in the Progress section of the blog! Check them out and feel free to use them on your own pages! :)

Our ICT skills are amazing!

Our session in the computer room on Friday produced some excellent results! While some children focussed on creating mock photostories, others explored Voki, Glogster and Blabberize. Children began to record voice overs for their end photostory.
Some children discovered a website called Sploder (http://www.sploder.com/) that allows children to build their own computer game! Many of our group blogs now contain embedded video games based around a gardening theme. I've had great fun playing them over the weekend!

These are just some of the photographs taken during our really productive session! There are many more on our Progress page. Feel free to copy them to your own blog!

Well done!

There is so much great work going on in all of the class blogs. I'm so proud of you all. Here are just a few highlights from the past few days!

The Garden Gangsters have loads of information about bees, rabbits and how you might attract butterflies to our garden! Keep an eye out for Aoibh's random facts too! Merci!

The Green Gardeners have loads of facts about slug traps and cheap ways to water plants. Jennifer even interviewed an 'expert' gardener about her talents. I love their Manga style pictures too. They are great for finding new ways to incorporate ICT in to their blog!

The Evergreen Team have been showing us ways to deal with those pesky slugs and treating us to some really beautiful garden sketches!

The Green bunch have been showing us how well they are collaborating with each other. Team work is so important! They have also been showing us some cool ways to get rid of those weeds and making your own compost!

JoJo has produced some amazing sketches of his ideas for the garden. Leonardo Da Vinci would be proud of them! They also have great ways to test how good the soil in the garden will be. Well done guys!

Tree Octopus?

Someone mentioned these in class today... Would it be possible to have one in the garden?
Check out this website and decide for yourself if it would be possible!

Information on the Tree Octopus!

There is extra information on the wikipedia page :)


Note from Mr. Curtin(added the day after the original post)

The tree octopus was an internet hoax started in 1998 by Lyle Zapato. Although not intended originally for this use, it is often used as a way of teaching young people about the dangers of false sources of information of the web.
Our discussions in class tell me that many children believed this species to be real based on a very convincing website. Don't feel foolish - most of the children they tested this out on fell in to the same trap.
What we can take from this experiment is that we should never trust just one source on the internet. It's always useful to check a few sites to see if the information matches.

I'm going to try to make one of these...

How to Make a Garden Fountain Out of, Well, Anything You Want

 

A fountain is composed of three things: water, which flows up a pipe and trickles back down in a continuous cycle; a pump, which propels the water; and a piece of sculpture, over which the water flows. The sculpture can be built from any material that will withstand constant water. For the project shown here, we used large stones found on-site, but pavers, some metals, or pottery will all work!

Here's what you need...

Regardless of the fountain material, the guts of the system remain the same. It starts with a waterproof tub or basin that lines a hole in the ground to make a reservoir for the water. Above that is a rigid mesh screen that blocks large debris from getting into the tub. The screen is topped with a support system made from a strong but water-resistant material, such as composite decking, to keep the body of the fountain from falling into the basin.

The submersible pump is the heart of the system. It sits below the water line in the basin, recirculating and fine-filtering the runoff from above. Since the pump is electric, the fountain needs to be within reach of an exterior outlet—pump cords rarely reach beyond 50 feet, and manufacturers discourage the use of extension cords. It also needs to be accessible for maintenance after the fountain is built, so you’ll need to cut a trap door in the screen that’s big enough for you to reach in, unhook the pump, and pull it out. (The screen and support decking can be camouflaged with small stones or even mulch.) The pipe that carries the water to the top of the sculpture screws onto the pump. It also includes a small ball valve that will allow you to adjust the fountain’s flow, giving you the option of creating anything from a calming trickle to a formidable geyser