Reclaiming the Kawana Garden

Katherine Brooks, Supervising Teacher at Kawana Elementary

Since November, the CalSERVES crew at Kawana Elementary School have been working hard to get their school garden back into shape. Luckily, we have many enthusiastic supporters: students, parents, school staff, and other community members that all want to see the garden in a better state and used more often.

Rebecca Leung, Garden Club Organizer

“At Kawana Elementary School, we strive to offer our students as many resources as possible. However, we have one resource that is being seriously underutilized: our school garden. With 8,000 square feet, the garden is a sizable lot and needs a lot of maintenance and love.” – Rebecca Leung

Rebecca Leung, a full-time mentor and the leader in our movement to reclaim the Kawana Garden, has worked tirelessly to organize a student Garden Club, care for seedlings, and decorate our garden. She has even contacted businesses for donations and organized two Community Garden Days.

In February, the community gathered to organize the garden shed, prune trees, remove dilapidated benches, weed garden beds and cut LOTS of blackberry vines. Parents and students also planted many seeds that are growing now inside pots in our classrooms.

5th grade student Temo says about the first garden day “It was fun cleaning up because it helps our community. My favorite part was pulling all the weeds.”

Temo’s sister and mother also attended the first Community Garden Clean-Up and are excited to participate in the next one that the mentors put on.

Students working hard in the garden - Adrian (2nd) Isai and Temo (5th)

On April 2nd, Kawana’s Garden Club will have a Garden Day once again, and this time, we will be able to plant edible foods, flowers, and herbs in the prepared garden beds. We will also paint over any graffiti on the benches, and continue to remove weeds that don’t belong there. So join us April 2nd from 10 am - 1 pm and be a part of or movement to reclaim the Kawana garden, and check out more photos of our garden events on Flikr!

We look forward to making Kawana’s garden beautiful, and having fun while doing it!

Cool Clubs at Taylor Mountain!

Richelle Andrae, AmeriCorps VIP at Taylor Mountain

This month at Taylor Mountain, we are planning lots of learning, and plenty of fun! Clubs on Friday, January 7th were a great success. We began practicing for Cool Sports: Basketball, which has 32 students extremely excited! So excited, in fact, that they are willing to put in the time and energy to run lines, and repeatedly practice passing and dribbling drills to get ready for the big event at the end of February.

We also had a Flamenco club, wherein students learned about traditional Spanish dancing, and even got to try out a few moves themselves.

Students in the Tea Party club made their very own tea bags by mixing a variety of spices and dried fruit, and also made crowns as they learned about English customs.

Harry Potter club was especially fun. Thanks to the acquisition of the magical sorting hat, students were sorted into different houses according to Harry Potter tradition. They also played Harry Potter Jeopardy, and are looking forward to learning how to play Quidditch!

We invite visitors to come check out clubs throughout the month to experience the magic of Taylor Mountain first hand!

Kawana Club Craziness!

Riis Larsen, Mentor at Kawana Elementary School

Kawana Student with his Story Stick

This Friday I led my first ever club. I chose to do an art project called “Make Your Story Stick”. We sat in a circle and chose an idea for our story; then the leader started it off. Each person would add a piece to the story and it turned into an hilarious tale. We discussed the idea that the story was unique because each person added his or her own idea. I explained that the concept of the Story Stick was to create a piece of art that was representative of your individual self, and that each person’s Stick would be different, just like the story.

A Story Stick is essentially a piece of bamboo wrapped in some colorful material (we used yarn), and then topped with large feathers. The yarn is simply tied and then wrapped, and then tied again at the end. The feathers are glued into place with a hot glue gun. We also used strings of beads to adorn the Sticks, and craft sand and glitter to cover the glue.

The club went well; all the students were able to make a stick. It was a little chaotic, but we were able to manage! It was very important to me to explain to the students about the artistic value of what we were doing, Very fun, a little crazy, but the students absolutely loved it, and of course, so did I.