buried treasure

Today we buried treasure!

The children learned about the importance of healthy soil and how composting is an amazing way to recycle kitchen scraps and yard waste into garden gold.

Each child chose a baggie filled with something to be composted.  In order to compare the benefits of helping the compost along by chopping up kitchen scraps, some bags contained whole items, like a banana peel, and some contained chopped up pieces.

We let the children sketch what their items looked like before we buried them.

Then we headed outside to the garden to bury our treasure.

A few of the items we buried included celery leaves, peppers, cleaned egg shells, looseleaf paper, lemon peel, and we even buried a plastic bag to see what would happen to it. 

Each child had a popsicle stick labeled with what type of treasure they had buried in order to  X mark the spot.

At our next meeting, we will dig up our treasures and see what has happened to them underground.  It should be a great experiment.

For a snack, we served bananas and clementine oranges, making sure to save the peels for a compost pile.

And we had just a few minutes to play our carnival game of feeding the monsters.  The kids had fun deciding if items in a bucket should be thrown in the trash, be composted, or be recycled.  Those monsters were pretty picky!