Core Subjects
Bringing Art to Life in the Garden
Your classroom garden can serve as a muse for creativity, expression and spark imagination. Art is an excellent means through which to explore and express ideas, helping students gain the skills of reflective learners. For many young people, creating art is a natural form of self-expression and is a central source of fulfillment, relaxation, and creativity in their lives.
Art activities create opportunities for different learners to approach subject matters in a variety of ways, thus providing avenues into the garden-based content for a diversity of young people. Incorporating the arts into garden-based learning programs helps learning have meaning for students. Art can make the outcomes of garden-based learning content visible and be an important tool used for program evaluation, assessment, and students sharing their learning with others.
Art is a great opportunity to use Little Green Thumbs student journals!
Some ideas to spark creativity:
Paint garden markers or rocks to mark plantings
Make a seed mosaic or seed mandala
Create a skit about the plants in your garden
Make prints using paint and stamps made from various plant parts.
Create and perform a garden-inspired dance expressing the growth of a seed or the opening of a flower bud.
Learn a collection of songs that relate to food, gardens, and the environment.
Use leaves to make crayon rubbings or fossils in clay.
Make fingerprint bugs! Prime watercolor paints by placing a bead of water on each color. Then stick your thumb in a watercolor pan and make a thumbprint on the paper. When it dries, add lines for legs, wings and antennae.
Try soil painting. Use different colours of soil as the medium.
Make a chlorophyll rubbing and use it for a drawing.
Explore time-lapse photography in the garden.
Using a movie camera with single-frame capability, make a time-lapse film of a plant growing.
Teaching Language Arts with the Garden
Children need opportunities to share their experiences, data collected, emerging ideas. Students will have opportunity to develop their literacy skills in the context of their garden, as they read, write, reflect and communicate their observations. Hearing or reading garden stories becomes less abstract as students can translate their learning to real life experience. A few ideas to integrate your language arts learning with the garden:
Some ideas to incorporate your garden into language arts learning:
Create an indoor plant care brochure to share with friends, family and other community members.
Keep a garden journal to record observations and experiences in the garden.
Collect seed catalogues and have students find specific information about your garden plants.
Write thank you notes to volunteers and garden sponsors
Brainstorm different adjectives to describe each plant in your garden
Study new vocabulary that relates to plants and gardens.
Follow written instructions to perform a garden task like planting seeds.
Write step-by-step instructions for common garden activities.
Prepare and deliver a presentation about the garden for other students, teachers, and parents.
Research the nutritional value of your favourite garden vegetable and then write a script for a 60-second advertisement designed to get more people to grow and eat it.
Create a garden reading nook. The garden provides a relaxing and inspiring environment, especially for students uncomfortable in the traditional classroom setting. Read books and poems while sitting in the garden to associate the activity of reading with a comforting atmosphere.
Teaching Math with the Garden
There are ample opportunities in the garden to calculate, compare, gather information and measure! Students can translate their data into charts, graphs, and reports. Designing and planting your Little Green Thumbs garden takes mathematical problem solving and practice. Hands on activities help to make the theory of math practical, motivating students who might be confused by abstract textbook questions and examples. We also highly recommend the book ‘Math in the Garden’ by KidsGardening.org for ideas!
Some ideas to incorporate your garden into math learning:
Measure the height of a group of plants and determine the mean, median, and mode.
Look for form. The garden is full of different shapes, both regular and irregular. Using cardstock or heavy paper, cut out a variety of shapes, such as circles, triangles, squares, and rectangles. Give each student a shape and ask him or her to find a matching form in the garden. On a nature walk, record observations about the shapes of trees and leaves in and around your garden.
Measure the volume of soil needed to fill your growing containers.
Use algebraic formulas to compute a variable, such as the amount of fertilizer to add per quart or liter of water. (Most fertilizer packages indicate how much to add per gallon of water.) Collect various dry bean seeds or plant leaves, and ask students to sort them by size, shape, color, and number.
Plant lettuce seeds in a flat or pot carefully keeping track of the number planted. As the seeds emerge, count the number of seedlings. Use these two numbers to calculate the germination rate (number of seedlings divided by number of seeds planted, multiplied by 100).
Plant a variety of seeds. Find out the number of days it should take for them to germinate (often this is listed on the seed packet). Chart the researched data, then track the actual time for germination and compare the results. Discuss the accuracy of the researched information and how seed producers may have arrived at those numbers. Discuss variables that may have affected your results.
Teaching Science with the Garden
There are ample opportunities in the garden to calculate, compare, gather information and measure! Students can translate their data into charts, graphs, and reports. Designing and planting your Little Green Thumbs garden takes mathematical problem solving and practice. Hands on activities help to make the theory of math practical, motivating students who might be confused by abstract textbook questions and examples. We also highly recommend the book ‘Math in the Garden’ by KidsGardening.org for ideas!
Some ideas to incorporate your garden into science learning:
How do plants reproduce? How do seeds work? Dissect flowers and seeds. What factors influence germination of seeds? What do seeds need to germinate? Create experiments to investigate how light, heat, and moisture affect germination.
How do plants use energy from the sun to make food? Discuss photosynthesis. Do plants need light to photosynthesize? What happens when a leaf is blocked from the light? Try testing for starch in blocked and unblocked leaves using iodine.
What do plants need to grow? Do all plants need the same things? Do plants need similar things as humans to grow? Create experiments investigating what happens when plants are exposed to different amounts of light, water, air, space, and nutrients.
Discuss how plants adapt for survival. Research adaptations of seeds for dispersal and adaptations of flowers for attracting pollinators. Observe pollinators in the garden.
Investigate the impact of environmental changes or climate change on plants
Investigate food chains and webs. Demonstrate how plants are the primary source of energy for all food chains.
Create a garden weather station. Record daily measurements and compare conditions with plant growth.
How are some soils different from others? Compare and contrast the properties of different types of soils (density, air spaces, presence of living organisms, composition, texture, smell, appearance).
Simulate soil erosion in your classroom garden. Observe the difference in soil loss when water is splashed on a tilted, planted pot, and on a tilted, unplanted (but soil-filled) pot. You can also test water filtration by passing water through an unplanted pot and a potted plant.
Observe the ecosystem of your classroom garden and learn about the relationships between living and nonliving elements.
Research the history of traditional plant breeding and food biotechnology.
Simulate the water cycle in the indoor garden by covering it with a “dome” of clear plastic. Study and observe the transpiration, evaporation, and condensation of water.
What are the properties of different types of light? Cover pots with cellophane of different colors to screen out all but one wavelength of light from plants. Observe plant growth.