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!

It works, it works, it works!

Posted on September 11, 2015 by kidsingardens

Nutrition/cooking education. Make no mistake: it works.

It’s said all the time but I’m here with hard evidence to prove it: When you grow and cook food with kids at school, in a fun, interactive way, they are more likely to try new foods and want to cook at home.

As mentioned in the last post, we made ratatouille in our garden/kitchen class. I also sent home a letter with the recipe to each family and encouraged the kids to teach their parents the recipe. I said, “If you do make ratatouille at home, please send me a picture.” The very next day I started receiving these:

Once I received the picture, I visited the student’s class with congratulations, a few questions about his/her cooking experience at home, and an invitation to have lunch in the garden that day with a friend. I’m thrilled that at our school “lunch in the garden” is a motivating reward, as it is sometimes hard to think of incentives that aren’t sweets/snacks or little throwaway objects.

None of this is lost on you, dear readers, but allow me to list the levels of goodness here:

-Students have a positive experience with a certain food at school and bring that excitement home.

-Students show off newly acquired skills to parents, and we all know that re-teaching is good learning.

-Families learn new recipes—in this case, one that is vegetarian, seasonal, adaptable and affordable.

-Students are congratulated and rewarded in front of their peers for extending their learning after school.

Many thanks to Wynola Flats for sourcing these delicious vegetables and ordering what I needed. I can’t tell you how exciting it was to stop in yesterday for more ingredients and have Stacy say, “People have been coming in, buying ingredients for ratatouille….”

……But I love ratatouille!

Posted on September 2, 2015 by kidsingardens

Today we started our series of one-hour garden/cooking lessons with our upper grades, adapted from the curriculum from the Sage Garden Project.

Huge. Success.

It went like this:

10 minutes in the classroom to discuss the theme of “seasonality” and how vegetables can be classified as warm season or cool season. We also ran through glove protocol, hand washing reminders and stern words about consequences for misusing a tool. (I like to set a firm precedent.)

Then to the garden for two 20 minute stations. I took one group to the outdoor kitchen to cook a warm season dish (ratatouille), and the classroom teacher and parent volunteers led their half of the class in preparing raised beds for our late September planting of cool season vegetables.

Then we tasted the ratatouille on baguette slices from a local bakery, the Candied Apple. I also sent home a letter to each family with the recipe and gardening tips for winter gardens. Enough words—look at what fun we had!

Best comment of the day:

“Mrs. Elisara—I hate tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant and peppers but I LOVE ratatouille!”

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!

Garden journals

Posted on September 6, 2013 by kidsingardens

Every year I volunteer to be a parent reading helper in my kids’ classes. This year I asked the teacher if I could be the garden teacher instead! She said “yes,” and so every week I have the class for a 1/2 hour of garden class. During our first class, each table of children received a pile of patterned and handmade papers, old seed packets and pages from gardening catalogues as well as a 50 cent composition notebook. They then proceeded to decorate the books they will use all year long to record garden vocabulary, keep their drawings and make journal entries. Last week we listed the words “snapdragon” and “transplant” and then made a chart of warm season and cool season vegetables. We went to the garden to plant a cool season veggie (broccoli) and tasted a warm season veggie (tomato.) I like that they will have these keepsake journals to take home at the end of the year, full of all of their new gardening knowledge.