‘Genius hour’ takes on gardening

Stephanie Pick likes to call her class the “genius hour.” For a half hour each day, she has a class of second-, third-, and fourth-graders who work on enrichment projects.

During the daily intervention period, students are divided in small groups according to their individual needs. Pick’s group gets extra time on hands-on projects in a variety of subjects. It usually starts with some research, she said.

But her latest project took an interesting turn. She brought a frog terrarium to school, added some dirt, a banana peal for compost and about 20 earthworms. She wanted her students to see how the earthworms tunnel. It worked very well. Using a flashlight, they could follow one of the tiny tunnels to the surface and then follow another hole down from the surface back into the terrarium.

But one day, as she was lighting up a tunnel near the bottom of the terrarium, Pick and her students, no- ticed movement. Her earthworms were reproducing.

The babies are so small and so thin, it’s almost impossible to see them without the flash light.

According to the website, http://animals.howstuff- works.com/animal-facts/earthworm3.htm, “Earthworms are simultaneous hermaphrodites, meaning worms have both male and female reproductive organs.” Pick is NOT planning a class on earthworm reproduction.

She plans to keep the baby worms and their parents for a few more weeks, but eventually they will move to a permanent home in the community garden across street. She discussed the ways worms help a garden in class.

This year, Katherine Anderson, the teacher of the ESTEAM class, is the garden coordinator for Cooper. Her classes have been working on the three garden beds.

ESTEAM stands for engineering, science, entrepreneurship, the arts and math. Like Pick’s class, the curriculum in ESTEAM is very hands on. Earlier, Anderson’s kindergarten and first-grade classes planted pumpkin seeds. Last week the tiny plants were moved into one of the garden beds and the older students added seeds for several kinds of fruits and vegetables.

Anderson is hoping that the pumpkin plants will survive the summer and have pumpkins when the students return to school in the fall. The community garden has been shared by Mercy Clinic and Cooper Elementary School since it opened in 2014. A grant from General Mills originally funded the garden.

Lynn Atkins/The Weekly Vista Rhett Nading (left) and Cooper Mayhew smooth top soil in one of the Cooper beds when their ESTEAM class had a turn in the community garden. The garden, behind the Mercy Clinic, is shared by Mercy, Cooper Elementary and a new community group.

Lynn Atkins/The Weekly Vista Makenzie Lawvey, Kali Kohl, Paycee Moll (behind the boys), Cooper Mayhew and Rhett Nading work in a Cooper bed in the Community Garden behind the Mercy Clinic.