September Garden Tour

Posted on September 21, 2016 by kidsingardens

Welcome back to the garden! As we do every once in a while, allow me to take you on a seasonal tour of garden education at Julian Elementary.

We started the year by “decorating” the garden with flowers. We let many unirrigated flower boxes and pots go over the summer, so we freshened them up with some color.

Third-fifth graders created/updated their garden journals for the year with seed catalogue collages. This lesson was forced inside because of the wind.

We have the best apple harvest to date. We’ve been picking them like crazy.

Last week I did lessons on how to use a dehydrator. I did a small demo in the class, then we went out to the garden for the students to get a chance to use the peeler/corer/slicer and layer up the trays.

We also talked about pears and made a “pear salsa” served on graham crackers. Students then took home small pear recipe booklets with an “at home cooking challenge.”

I also chose a new crop of garden ambassadors, and they jumped right into their new jobs: helping with lunchtime composting and giving the Monday Morning Garden Report.

Garden education is expanding at our school. We split my job from last year and now I am the in-school garden educator two days a week, and the unbelievably awesome Miss Kat is the after school garden educator three days a week.

Though I have the best support imaginable from administrators, teachers, staff, Pathways, and Pathways director and rockstar-in-residence Susi Jones, it is so awesome to have an in-the-garden, shoulder to shoulder, fellow teacher in Kat. I have enjoyed so many things—the technical garden planning, the lesson sharing, the inspiration of a kindred vision—but I’ll focus on one thing in particular.

Every week I go to the garden and there are wonderful things happening that someone else made happen. It is downright thrilling. Thanks Miss Kat for bringing so much wisdom, experience, love for children, and love for the earth to our little public school….

Here’s a sample of Miss Kat’s work in the garden in our first month of school:

She collected coyote gourds and the students decorated them and chose seeds with which to fill them:

Students collected and examined seeds:

She also taught the students to make tiny Johnny Appleseed dolls with dried apple faces:

Finally, she and her husband Jim created this beautiful “eat a rainbow” mural for the outdoor lunch area. We love you Miss Kat!

Humanities in the garden and kitchen (ESY Part 4)

Posted on July 31, 2015 by kidsingardens

Something garden educators believe: all subjects can be taught in the garden. Something I believe: this is true, but some subjects are easier to teach in the garden than others. Science and math come easily, and language arts is not hard to incorporate either. I think the most challenging curricular integration is social science. It takes a lot of planning to align lessons, plant the historical crops and create the wrap-around materials to deliver the material. Edible Schoolyard excels at this. Here is one of their staff laying out how all of their garden and kitchen lessons match up with 6th, 7th and 8th grade social science.

Then they walked us through one of their lessons. As you can see below, there are numerous concepts involved in teaching the history of rice in China. (This is hand-drawn and colored—again, back to beauty!)

Then they laid out all of the vegetables we’d be cooking with (beauty, again)….

And we got cooking in our teams….

..to create the most beautiful and delicious platter of fried rice, with veggies from the garden.

Here’s another lesson they teach:

We rotated through various stations to learn this content, one of which was a snack-making station, which involved amaranth from the garden.

It goes on….here we ate a meal in the dining commons that represents the Columbian Exchange. Like I said, amazing.

Activities in the garden also teach history. Here is a lesson on various techniques ancient cultures used to move things. After this mini-lesson, students were challenged…

…to move various heavy items using this pile of stuff. History, engineering, experiential learning…oh my.

Other activities work as scavenger hunts in the garden:

Can an average school garden replicate this? It would be very challenging without significant resources, but nonetheless I remain inspired to think through connections between the garden and the social sciences in the coming year. It’s always helpful and inspiring to look at the “best of the best”—thank you Edible Schoolyard for pioneering this work!

Things I’ve learned about teaching… and beetles

Posted on April 23, 2015 by kidsingardens

One thing I’ve learned about garden education is that there are many tasks that just do not lend themselves to large classes of students. There simply isn’t enough space for 25 or more kids to stand around a raised bed, or have his/her own tool, or put a transplant each in the ground. As such, I’ve stumbled upon the idea of having a large group activity that I explain and start with the entire class, often at the table in the garden (or on windy days, in the main classroom with the classroom teacher or garden volunteer supervising) and then take smaller groups to the garden to do an activity.

I’ve also learned that ladybugs are not bugs, but beetles.

Last week I combined these two bits of knowledge with the following activity with the younger elementary set.

I began with a mini-lesson on the difference between true bugs and beetles, followed by all of the astonishing facts and figures about the volume and diversity of beetles on earth. Then I passed out a blank sheet and a template of cartoons, and the kids copied this sentence and had fun embellishing their papers with either their own designs or copies of the cartoons.

I took smaller groups of six out to the garden for five minutes at a time to paint little lady beetles on our circle of tree stumps. (I love whimsy in children’s gardens.)

It was a hit! Over the next month I will be switching out kids’ work on our garden bulletin board. They get so excited to see their drawings on display!