Martha's Table School Yard Garden

This past week Martha's Table volunteers and kids have been hard at work making sure our school yard garden is under way for this years harvest season.

As you see in the two slide-shows below, our volunteers are making sure all of the garden plots are put together with care. After all, these gardens will help feed the children in our programs as well as folks that receive food from our mobile soup kitchen, McKenna's Wagon.







The best part is that the kids from our daycare program got their hands dirty. Children from our pre-school classrooms helped our volunteer and garden engineer, Bobby, plant:

• Marigolds - they act as a natural bug repelant
• Tomato vines
• Russian kale
• Red bell peppers
• and the very speical bean sprouts that started as seeds and planted in plastic cups by the children in our pre-school (please see previous post in May, Planting Seeds!)

Enjoy the photos and feel free to stop by anytime to see the garden in the Martha's Table school yard.

"writing takes the boring out of Sundays"

Friday was the First Annual Career Day for the Elementary and Bridge Programs at Martha's Table. We had guests from all different types of careers from a lawyer, a banker, a writer to firefighters. I met with a 3 children from the Elementary and Bridge Program to discuss their favorite part of career day. Pictured is Alexander, Bryan and Liliana, here Liliana is describing her story Ghost Haunting.

They all expressed that they love to write, so I asked them a simple question...
Why do you write?

"I write to encourage myself to be the best I can be and to express my feelings. I also write to inspire people to do good things. I write when I am lonely and have nothing to do. Also the reason I write is to make people laugh".

- Alexander Perkins, age 9, 3rd grade. Author of the story, The Enormous Monster.

"The reason I write is to express my feelings. Many of my stories are based on true stories. My stories are a memory of my great-grandmother, elderly people talk about their experiences. I tell stories in honor of them. The ghost stories are very fast to write, and the story forms in my head as if it was waiting for me. In my way I think that writing takes the boring out of Sundays. Novels are my way of taking time to create many characters that are my inventions."

- Liliana Campos, age 10, 4th grade. Author of the story, Ghost Haunting.


The children were also very excited about seeing the firetruck and meeting firefighters.

Thanks to all the professionals that took time out of their busy schedule to show the children their potential.

Rubber eggs, moldy bread, exploding volcanoes, crystals and more!

One of the great things about working at Martha's Table is the fact that I never know what the day will bring. Tuesday, I happened to be a judge for our 1st Annual Science Fair here at Martha's Table. As a judge for the science fair I evaluated over 16 science projects and found that the kids had outdone themselves. All of them had hypothesized, researched, tested and concluded their own project. They were willing and excited to explain their experiments to us and that was the best part. At each project they were waiting patiently to explain exactly how they had come to their conclusion.

Some projects stood out:

• There was the Lemon Battery, apparently lemons can power a light bulb for 5 days! I found out that the secret ingredient was citrus.
• Ellese was very proud of her "Amazing Egg". Now I know that if you submerge an egg in vinegar it will pop from the acid and when submerged in oil, it turns into rubber!
• One student explained that the fizz in soda had to do with the amount of phosphoric acid. Cola's fizz more than Ginger Ale.

Please check out the slide show above to see photos of this event. I am so proud of the Children and Bridge programs for researching and displaying their projects so well.

Good Job!

Kim

When the Cops Come a Knockin'

The children in our after-school programs are on spring break! That means all day programming at Martha's Table. Today the kids put their dancing shoes on and rocked out to the DC Police Department band "When the Cops Come a Knockin'"
Check out some of the dance moves below

"I Know I Can Change"

Last month the Elementary and Bridge After-School Programs put on a Black History Month Performance. We captured the kids from the Elementary program perform a step routine in honor of the first our 44th President, Barack Obama.