Project 1 Curriculum

Garden Education

As they come up, I will try to add some curriculum ideas.  Generally, they will be activities that I have not yet tried in the classroom but they act as a place to start--a collection of ideas that will hopefully be useful in the future because this field is so important in a modern curriculum.  A garden education can teach students how to take in more from their surroundings in order to understand the significance of the food they eat, the trees and plants they walk past, the water they drink, the air they breathe and the trash they throw away.  Here are a two ways to bring Project 1 into the classroom:

1. Native Plant Exploration

Teacher: Bring in 5-7 samples of plants that are native to your area (even better if they are from your school yard or neighborhood)
Students: In groups, look up one of the plant samples in research books or on pre-approved websites and create a poster or presentation and share with the class.
Information given on the poster would vary from one age group to the next but would likely include the plant name, the type of plant (shrub, tree, flower), pictures or drawings of the plant through different seasons and through different stages of life (seeds, new growth, how tall and wide it is meant to get).  Put the posters up for display and come back to the project whenever the season changes!

2. Garden Timeline

It would be ideal if every school had a garden.  The garden could provide food for the students and act as an almost year-round teaching tool (depending on your region).  Unfortunately, most schools do not have gardens but there are ways we can work around this.  As students are learning about vegetables and planting seasons, a calendar or timeline could be created by the students (maybe placed as a boarder around the walls of the classroom) to which items may be affixed.  Either actual seeds or drawings or pictures cut from magazines could be attached to mark the month or season when a specific plant must be sown.  Then, farther down on the timeline, at the common harvest time for your school's region, another picture or drawing can be attached to show which plants are harvested when.  To further emphasize the timeline for each plant, colorful string could link the seed sowing date to the harvest date.  This project creates a sense of the time and effort that growing veggies will take and allows for an ongoing (and colorful) classroom project that can be added to as time permits or as relative units come up.

You could also congruently display your classroom garden on a three by three foot square to gain a better image of a garden space, if space and time permits.  On this square, only the seeds and pictures of plants that are to be sown or harvested that month will be visible, thus the pictures are portraying what the students would see in a garden bed outside.  Keep in mind that in order to cover the entire growing season in one school year, the growing months will have to be condensed!

The timeline and garden square provide a visual record of the seasonal impact on ecology and agriculture.  They show students where their food comes from and how the life cycle of each plant is structured and played out.