“Blue & Gray Goes Green!”: Lower School Students Visit Greenhouse

2/4/2010

 

Poly’s “Blue and Gray Goes Green!” initiative (to bring sustainable practices and environmental awareness into our curriculum and school operations) remains a priority for Headmaster David B. Harman during his “milestone” year, his tenth at Poly’s helm.

 

From our award-winning landmarked Lower School building (the first LEED-Certified school building in New York City) to our new greenhouse on Dyker Heights, Poly had exercised leadership in greening and sustainability.

 

Expanded, student-operated recycling on our Dyker Heights campus and faculty curricular initiatives (such as Nursery B’s birding study on Jamaica Bay) are also enriching teaching and learning at the school.

 

In another milestone moment, on Friday, January 29, Lower School students visited Poly’s new greenhouse for the first time, one of three or four projected “laboratory” moments for KA students (and 3B buddies) on our Dyker Heights campus this spring. (This visit is also part of a growing effort to more closely link our two campuses through faculty, parent, and student interactions.)

 

Lower School students, along with faculty Risa Novikoff (KA Head Teacher); Evelyn Gomez-Perez (KA Co-Teacher); and Elizabeth Armstrong (3B Head Teacher), arrived by bus at the greenhouse at about 9:30 AM.

 

Student excitement was palpable. But, even faculty were inspired. Indeed, Novikoff commented that the visit was “a dream for me as this is a project I have always wanted to do and is now becoming a reality.”

 

Hosts Sandy Bornstein (Science) and Linda Aponte (Science) welcomed their young visitors and noted that, despite the cold outside, the greenhouse remained warm inside. Bornstein explained that the greenhouse trapped heat and “tricked” the plants inside into “thinking it wasn’t winter.”

 

Aponte kicked off the greenhouse experience with Diana Hutts Aston’s A Seed is Sleepy, a wonderful and poetic picture book that illustrated the properties and functions of seeds.

 

Aponte then passed around a tray of seeds gathered from the Dyker Heights campus for students to touch and examine. She also noted the vast difference in size between the tiny seeds of a strawberry, for instance, and those of a giant date palm that can weigh up to sixty pounds.

 

Seeds had evolved different ways of getting themselves transported, Aponte commented, as she pointed to the spikes or burrs on the shell of a liquid ambar nut.

 

Passing around a coconut floating in a Tupperware container of water, Aponte explained, “Some seeds can float, too.”

 

Aponte and Bornstein then passed around pre-soaked lima beans and provided a lesson in seed anatomy. Each Lower School participant received a lima bean, unpeeled it, split apart the nutrient-filled, endospermic halves, and examined the pale white embryonic leaves and root nestled in between.

 

After careful safety instructions, Bornstein and Aponte then helped students examine lima beans under a microscope, a first for many that morning in the greenhouse. One student exclaimed—“Wow, this is too cool!”—as he looked through the eyepieces of his scope.

 

These hands-on explorations of seed anatomy provided the perfect segue to a teachable moment about Native American culture and agronomy: the myth of the “three sisters.” (Lower School students had already learned about the ancient Meso-American practice of planting beans, maize, and squash together in order to ensure long-term soil fertility and productive fruiting.)

 

Several Lower School students re-enacted the myth of the three sisters via pantomime for the entire group.

 

Then, returning to practical horticulture and botany, students planted beans, maize kernels, and squash seeds, themselves. They used small organic pots and graduated cylinders to water their seeds. Some seedlings remained in the greenhouse, while others returned with the students to the Lower School.

 

During subsequent visits this spring, the same Lower School students will come back to the greenhouse to observe their germinated seedlings, learn more about plant anatomy, and gain further insight into the environment and growing things.

 

For a photo gallery of the inaugural Lower School greenhouse visit, please click here.