It’s almost time for the Open House for the new and returning Dirt to Dinner families. There’s a lot of work still to do to get ready but I’m excited to be getting the Fall program going. This session we are expecting a dozen families. Half were in the Spring program and half are new. We’ll have a balanced group as far as boys and girls and the ages will range from five to eleven.

In between meetings we’ll communicate by email and our Google group again this session since it seemed to work well in the Spring. We’ll pass on the Ning this time but we are keeping the accounts with VoiceThread since I know I will use it and we hope more of the kids will be involved in making VoiceThreads this session.

We’ll be rotating each family through ten different areas of responsibilities to help the kids personally experience the interconnectedness of all the systems working in the garden. I predict Worm Wrangler will be a pretty popular one. I am also looking forward to seeing what the kids do when it’s their turn to be the Journalist.

The Open House will also include a scavenger hunt to find various kinds of seeds around the garden. I went through earlier today with a camera and came up with twenty different kinds visible on, in or around the plants, if you include the potatoes. It will surprise me if the kids find all the ones that I did, but it won’t surprise me if they come up with something I didn’t. New eyes are forever seeing things in the garden that I seem to miss looking at it every day.

I also have seeds on hand for the kids to plant if they would like. It’s always fun to start some seeds in the dirt at the beginning of the project. And I have a lot of seeds available for them to just explore, compare and add to seed starting jars to take home with them.