This year the seed festival was even more meaningful for us. Over the summer I downloaded the lists of what miss L needs to know from our state. I worry that she might get behind homeschooling (though I'm much less worried about that now) and wanted to be certain that she is learning along with her peers. Part of the social studies component is knowing how people lived long ago. Also the kindergarten curriculum puts an emphasis on life science and a seed festival is a wonderful place for discovering that!
Brad and I wanted to hear a few talks as well and the seed festival is just plain fun!
We were ravenous when we arrived and stopped for some really awesome hamburgers. We passed the donut truck (seriously! freshly made donuts!) and thought we'd come back later. While Brad was listening to a talk about perennial onions the kids and I wandered over to the area where they had hoop trundeling (yup, I had to google that!). They actually had a variety of games that kids would have played during Thomas Jefferson's lifetime but this is the one that we spent the most time playing. They gave each of the big kids a hoop and a stick and let them go.
We quickly abandoned the sticks, but spent lots of time trying to get those hoops to go in a straight line.
Eventually we just went for hula hooping. :o)
When we were done with that we walked around the green a bit. Mister W found some very interesting flowers to sniff along with loads of other interesting sights to watch. There were tons of families and lots of displays interesting to children and adults.
We walked around the displays for a bit and then it was time for the sustainable living talk. I really wanted to hear this one so miss L and I walked to the tent. The speaker talked softly and the tent was PACKED so we stood on the edges and I was so impressed as miss L sat quietly in the shade of this tree and built boats out of the leaves that had fallen on the ground. I just love watching her play and discover.
Here is one of miss L's boats. The stick is the mast and the leaf is the sail. The bottom leaf that made the boat had just fallen off.
We learned a lot. I got some ideas for creating an edible landscape in the front garden which I'm super excited to implement this spring (and a little bit this fall). We always leave the seed festival with tons of packets of seeds and heads full of ideas. I think we have a totally new plan for the garden next year and even though we have only a little space, I think we'll be able to grow a lot of our food!
The last place we visited was the children's tent. They had cards to make from dried flowers and those were fun though I'm sad that they got destroyed. Apparently fragile dried flowers and young kids don't mix very well. The very last thing we did was their favorite.
The booth had wooden frames from the craft store. They covered the frames in a generous amount of ceramic tile adhesive and then the kids covered the adhesive in found objects from nature. There was dried moss, acorns, leaves, pinecones, sweet gum balls, dried berries, beans and more. They had a huge selection! Some kids made theirs with very uniform designs using only a couple of kinds of materials but our kids used as many different materials as they could find. Both of them enjoyed it and the finished frames look amazing! What a wonderful souvenir from our day!
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