“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
After learning about the art of Bonsai, the other day we discovered another plant that is a national treasure of Japan: marimos.
When we arrived at the class we found a glass jar full of water and two little green balls floating in water. Suddenly, a lot of questions came to our mind: is it alive? is it a plant? Is it an animal?
We would soon answer all our questions just by reading. We were presented with four texts that contained all the answers to the questions and we had only 5 minutes to read through them. This time limit forced us to put into practice comprehension strategies like skimming and making predictions that are key when we want to move from recognising words to fully comprehend a text.
In pairs, we read the texts and we agreed that only two of them had the information that we needed. Then, in order to discover the marimos, we had to choose one text to read more carefully and we decided that the first text, with images and shorter text, was the best for our purpose. What text would you have chosen?
As you can see, it is a plant that requires indirect light and cool water that must be changed every fifteen days. To keep the round shape, it is important to roll it carefully on your hands every now and then.
We were very surprised to see that marimos grow very slowly… only 5 mm per year just to reach the 30 cm that measure the biggest ones. This raised a lot of new questions… How old is our marimo? How does it measure?
Seeing a marimo grow, just like reading, is a beautiful slow process that it can not be rushed.
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