Choosing to integrate gardening into your teaching curriculum can offer your students a different atmosphere from the classroom. This also allows them to enjoy nature as well as find alternate hands-on ways to learn the subjects you already teach.
Beginning a Garden Curriculum: Working with Children
As you may know, most children don’t have the patience to wait a month or more for seeds to grow into plants. Because of differences like this between children and adults, your curriculum should consider what your students will need to stay interested and enthusiastic about gardening.
- Choose seeds that will begin to sprout as soon as possible
- Choose a variety of plants to put in your garden; having many different plants will be more interesting to your students than just one or two types
- You may want to consider only using large seeds (that also sprout quickly), like radishes, peas, cress, gourds, pumpkins, and sunflowers. This way younger children will be able to handle the seeds without any issues
- Give your students an area that can be “theirs,” so they can interact with each other in the garden they have created; this can help make the garden into a magical space that the children will love
Beginning a Garden Curriculum: Integrating Studies
If you worry that adding gardening to your curriculum can take away from established learning time, be assured that you can still teach english, science, math, and social studies while you garden with your students.
Reading:
- Choose vocabulary words that have to do with gardening
- Ask your students to read the seed packets and signs in your garden
- Have your students read about the plants in your garden or the techniques you use
Writing:
- Ask your students to write a poem or short story about the garden
- You can assign your students to write a report about what they learned, from books and from real life
Math:
- Measure the changes in plant height as your plants grow
- Measure grown fruit or flowers for circumference, diameter, and/or radius
- Estimate the number of flowers in a flower bed
Science:
- You can use your actual plants to demonstrate what you learn in class
- Teach what all plants need to grow to survive; you can extend this to animals as well
Social Science:
- Teach about the origins of the plants you use as well as the most commercially popular plants
- Discuss with your students how farming works and the process it takes in order for food to get from the farm to our plates
A great way to end the gardening season is to make food from your harvest as a class, as well as give students your grown flowers to take home! Don’t forget that there are plenty of already established gardening curriculum programs, like the Classroom Victory Garden Project and CitySeed, that can help you get started.
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