It’s a beautiful spring day. You are teaching a lesson to your fourth graders on finding the area of a rectangle. But instead of being inside your classroom completing a practice book page, you and your students are outside measuring the planting beds that are staked in your school garden. The students then sit outside at tables together and use those measurements to find the area of each bed.
Earlier that afternoon, a kindergarten class was using Unifix cubes to measure the height of the sunflowers and put them in order from shortest to longest. Yesterday, a second-grade class was testing different types of soil to see which absorbed the most water.
At our school, we wanted these types of lessons for our students, so we created a school garden. A school garden creates endless opportunities to extend learning beyond the school walls. In planning our project, we considered the impact that a school garden would have on our students, our community and the environment.
Our Purpose
Our school garden has…
Student Involvement
Our students have…
Community Involvement
We have created partnerships in our community by…
For the Environment
Growing a garden…
Why create a school garden? Why not? “A school garden provides an outdoor learning environment and is a means to create a sense of season and a place for all children…a school garden puts the natural world at the students’ fingertips. This living laboratory offers a rich context for exploring science, nutrition, social studies, math, art, language arts and more.” (Life Lab Science Program, p. 5)
Useful Resources:
Planting Seeds Learning to Compost
Clearing space for the garden.
Dawn Douds has been teaching at Abraham Lincoln Elementary School in Bethel Park, PA for 24 years. She teaches in the same classroom where she attended first grade! Along with the school garden program, she assists with a few additional programs at the school – an after-school mentoring program, a pre-school STEAM program and a family coding program. Feel free to contact Dawn with questions or comments at douds.dawn@bphawks.org.
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