WAMO

 

Module 4 --WAMO 

In the short dark days of winter, it can be tough have enough daylight to spend in the garden during after school programming.  Luckily, the students don’t seem to mind when you bring just a little bit of the garden indoors. 

Module 4 is all about making the soil rich, and to start, we learned about four main components that are necessary to have any soil at all.  WAMO! That is to say, Water, Air, Minerals, and Organic Matter.  Students take well to this fun funky word, and for the particularly lower grades, WAMO is also a lesson on acronyms. 

 At the beginning of the after school garden session there was still some daylight left. After tasting some of the greens that have managed through the winter, the students were encouraged to make a guess and choose something that they thought fit into the category of Organic Matter to bring into the classroom.  Many of the students immediately made a face and said; “Huh? What’s Organic Matter”. 

We built the suspense, and waited until we went inside before answering the question.  Each student choose one thing that they thought  was “Organic Matter” before heading inside.  

Once we were inside and settled, we started a conversation about the different natural materials that can be broken down and turned into soil.  After each student got to share their item from the garden and explain why they chose it, we saw examples of other kinds of organic matter that can be made into soil. 

So what else do we need to make soil?  It can’t all be dried leaves, twigs, and banana peels.  This is where WAMO comes into play. Along with a set of mysterious containers that contain unknown items. 

Opening the first container, we start with WATER, a familiar and recognizable substance to the students.  We talk about why water might be necessary in soil, how water moves through soil, and how water is used by plants and critters in the soil.

The next container is AIR.  This is always fun because students will inevitably guess air only after the initial amusement of being shown a container that seemingly has nothing in it.  We then talk about how important air is to all kinds of life and how it leaves space in the soil. 

Now we move to a container of rocks.  Referencing the acronym WAMO, written on a white board, we try to think of all of the other names for rocks until we land on MINERALS.  Here is fun to mention the rocks that we eat! Salt is a well known substance by most all elementary schoolers, it is easy to make the connection that salt, like sand, is made of small pieces of minerals. 

Opening the final container, we come back to… Organic Matter…We can go over what we already learned about Organic Matter. 

Now that we know the four main components of soil we can see if we can make some!

Students get to put a little each WAMO ingredient into the magical soil making WAMO Jar, then we each shake it up a bunch. 

Now when the particles settle, do we have soil?

Then we talk about how much time it takes to make soil.  It is kind of like baking a cake, just because all of the ingredients are put together, does not mean that you have a cake quite yet.