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With the butterfly send-offs, students are already aflutter on how we can get more monarchs into our garden next year.  We went outside and I explained how and why last year's class designed the garden as well as commenting on successes and failures.  Many students were very inquisitive as to the rationale of why first graders chose specific plants and were very eager for me to identify them.  Fortunately, or unfortunately, the majority of the plants had already bloomed and all that was left was the dried out flowers and leaves making it overly hard to identify the plants.  There were several plants within the garden which I was unable to identify (I knew they were not weeds) resulting in many hypothesis of how/why/when/where they came to be in our garden.

This conversation started turning into a heated conversation as to how a plant would show up, without being planted.  I promised we would learn more about this in just a bit and they needed to be patient!!!

Connecting this discussion to our garden wants and needs, students participated in a Generate, Sort, Connect, Elaborate thinking routine to expand upon and clarify the garden.  Students were asked to design a dream garden for monarchs via illustration. They were asked to think big and to think broad from their perspective of both an entomologist (bug scientist) as well as a monarch caterpillar and butterfly. The main objective was to attract more butterflies.

After time to think, ponder, and illustrate, students gathered back at the carpet to take their many ideas and represent each idea on one piece of post-it note paper.  All student ideas transitioned from visual ideas into written ideas.  From this extensive amount of ideas, students began to SORT their ideas into smaller, more defined categories.  We then took these ideas and rearranged them on the paper into the more definitive groupings and began to see patterns.

After sorting the ideas, we rearranged the post-it notes into more specific ideas.  This is where the students CONNECTED their ideas together and elaborated and refined their ideas.

Finally, after extending the thoughts, students became acutely aware that some of these brilliant ideas might not be able to be done for financial, spacial, practical, etc.. reasons thus the brainstorming of new ideas began.

This coming week we will be taking our dream monarch garden ideas and cross referencing them to the requirements necessary for certifying our garden as a Certified Monarch Waystation.