I gave my students a writing assignment the other day where they had to find their favorite place at the school, take a picture of it and write a story about why it's their favorite spot. I like to start assignments like that by telling them my own story so I talked about my favorite place - the first grade garden. They have a space carved out of the edge of the playground and it's been going great guns in this tropical environment, despite the occasional basketball rolling among the rows.

Here's what it looked like last week:

This is the corn, eggplant and something that might be cabbage. Plus one of those errant basketballs.

There are also pots of lettuce, tomatoes and the two little trees on the right are papaya trees.

Here's another view of the papaya trees:

But the cutest thing of all are all the mud boots lined up, just like at the Children's Center.