Water Plant Calendar

Wednesday morning, as we opened up the classroom for the day, we noticed something was wrong. Two of our potted plants were so wet they began to collapse and our tray was FULL of water. What's worse, some of our plants had begun to sprout! 

What happened? 

How did everything get so wet?

This is a problem best solved together!

After some digging during our meeting conversation, we figured out that everyone was watering our plants according to their own calendars they made last week. We found at least 10 calendars, which means at least 10 people watered. 

This caused us to wonder, can plants get too much water? 

Do they ever get not enough? 

How can we make sure this doesn't happen again?

We need a calendar.

We had calendars, and everyone followed their own. How can we make sure our plants don't drown again?

We can all make a calendar. 

Tell me more, that sounds like what we did before.

We can make a calendar for a job. Like our jobs for school.

So we can make watering the plants a job?

Yes!

But we only have 6 weeks of school left, so only 6 people can water?

Silence...

As we divided up to caper, SuS approached me and informed me that he was an expert calendar maker. He, in fact, knew just how to lay out a calendar. He let me know that calendars need:

A box for words

boxes for numbers

numbers and words

It took a bit, but we decided that we needed 5 boxes, one for each day of school, plus a big box on top. The boxes needed to be big so we could write numbers and words in them. 

SuS worked hard to make our calendar just right. 

But, what comes next? We have boxes, we have ideas, but we don't have a plan. 

Commence, meeting day two! 

The plan:

Share Sus's calendar with the class. (they loved it!)

Figure our what words we need. (a title and days of the week)

Make a plan to schedule our days. (we need names and pictures, just like our jobs chart.)

Write the words. 

Using a planner as our guide, we decided where each day needed to go, found the day of the week word by finding the first letter sound, and wrote the letters we saw. 

JI listened to each word and wrote each letter of our calendar title, WATER PLANT CALENDAR. What strong letter brains!

One problem solved, now on the the next...

How much water do our plants actually need?!