Learning Themes
One of the goals of the Little Green Sprouts garden is to help students create meaningful, informed connections between the food they grow and eat, and the agricultural processes involved in producing it.
Food production today is a complicated process that most people are very disconnected from in modern life. This can make agriculture difficult for young students to understand, and the food system may seem even more opaque. In a vast sea of mixed messages about food, farming, and nutrition, learning more about our food system is key to making informed food-related decisions that have the power to improve personal health and the economic, social, and environmental well-being of our communities.
We’ve compiled some of our favourite resources to the right that you can use to make a connection between your garden to the larger food system and agriculture!
Download the Little Green Sprouts Agriculture Education Infographic
Some ideas to get your students thinking about ecosystems and natural cycles:
Invite a farmer into your class or visit a farm. Discuss the differences between your garden and a farm. Discuss the ways that farmers steward the land and water.
Make a Business Plan. Develop a simple business plan to sell some of your plants or garden vegetables. What are the challenges you face? How does this relate to the challenges faced by farmers?
Relate Garden Challenges to the Farm. Relate the challenges in your garden – pests, water or air issues to the issues and uncertainty faced by farmers.
Discuss a Farmer’s Reliance on Nature. Brainstorm all of the ways that farmers depend on nature. How do farmers work with nature and adapt farming practices? What are some natural occurrences that might cause issues for farmers? How do farmers plan for these natural occurrences?
Show Appreciation for Farmers. Have students write letters to a local farmer thanking them for their hard work and describing what they enjoyed about eating their products.
Explore the science and technology of Agriculture. Think about the tools that students use in the garden. How does using the right tools help to accomplish your gardening jobs more efficiently? Research different tools and technology used by farmers. How are some farming tools the same or different from the tools used in the garden?
Agriculture Education Poster
View or download the LGS Agriculture Education infographic for inspiration to connect your garden to agriculture!
Related Resources
Building Environmental Stewardship with Your Garden
A school garden is a perfect opportunity to nurture a child’s curiosity and drive to explore the world around them. A garden puts understanding of the natural world at a student’s fingertips, by providing the context to observe the language of nature and principles of ecology hands-on. In a garden, ecological relationships and principles that are often invisible to us come to the forefront: diversity, energy and resources, sustainability, community, interdependence, cycles, succession and more. Children explore,
experience, understand and see first-hand these relationships and phenomena at work firsthand in their school garden.
View or Download the Little Green Sprouts Environmental Stewardship Infographic Poster to the right
Even for the youngest students, observing the natural cycles cultivates wonder and appreciation for our natural world. By creating opportunities to foster wonder and understanding, we can help students to appreciate and care for the natural world. This care help students to develop their responsibility as stewards of our environment. In cultivating stewardship in youth, we ensure these ecological systems are protected and that our food and farming systems continue to provide us fresh, safe and nutritious food.
Environmental Stewardship Infographic Poster
View or download and find inspiration for using your garden to cultivate environmental stewardship.
Related Resources
Some ideas to get your students thinking about ecosystems and natural cycles:
Invite a farmer into your class or visit a farm. Discuss the differences between your garden and a farm. Discuss the ways that farmers steward the land and water.
Make a Business Plan. Develop a simple business plan to sell some of your plants or garden vegetables. What are the challenges you face? How does this relate to the challenges faced by farmers?
Relate Garden Challenges to the Farm. Relate the challenges in your garden – pests, water or air issues to the issues and uncertainty faced by farmers.
You can make a simple self-sustaining terrarium from a 2-litre pop bottle. Students can observe the interactions, relationships and cycles occurring in their ecosystem. Building is just the beginning! Have students monitor their ecosystems and record their observations in their journal. What happens if students disturb their ecosystem or a pollutant is introduced?
Together with students, consider how they can best care for the environment and the actions they can take.
Make a collage contrasting the ways that humans hurt and help plants.
Do a waste audit. Do an audit of food waste for your classroom, school or home. Collect your food waste for a few days and weigh or measure by volume. Divide by the number of days. Figure out what size of composting system would be needed to divert this waste from the landfill.
Inspire Healthy Eating and Positive Food Behaviours with Your Garden
The primary goal of garden-based nutrition education is to get children to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables. Teachers are using school gardens to help students explore their relationships with food and foster healthy eating practices. School gardens provide a platform for varied food related educational content, ranging from food production, agriculture and ecology, to food justice, nutrition and beyond. The capacity of the garden to engage learners with diverse needs, and engage students in hands-on, experiential and inquiry-based learning results in a higher level of engagement with food literacy education, allowing students to better internalize their learning.
Healthy Eating Infographic Poster
View or download for evidence-based ways your garden can inspire healthy eating!
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Activities to inspire healthy eating with your classroom garden:
Have a Salad-celebration. We encourage Little Green Sprouts classrooms to celebrate the end of a growing season with a salad-bration. Try mixing your lettuce salad with creative sides like beans, seeds, and other vegetables.
Taste test. Do a grocery store vs. garden grown taste test or simply taste test the garden vegetables. Ask students to describe the vegetables using all of their senses: smell, taste, touch, sound and sight. Give each vegetable a rating of 1 to 5, based on each sense.
Dry some herbs. The traditional method of drying herbs is to tie them in bunches and hang them upside down. Once dried, combine different herbs to create your classroom’s own unique tea blend or try making herb butter. You might also make sweet-smelling sachets or potpourri.
Encourage students to explore the origins and traditional uses of herbs. Research locally grown herbs used traditionally by Indigenous peoples in your region, as well as herbs used by Indigenous people today. Where were the herbs in your garden first grown and used? Do they have symbolic significance (e.g., sage: wisdom)? Were they grown for medicinal, culinary, or other applications? Are there modern products that are still derived from these important plants? Make a chart to match the uses of various herbs with newer medicines or products that have assumed the same role in modern times.
Prepare salad dressing. Preparing salad dressing is a great way to learn about emulsion and Canadian crops such as mustard or canola oil. Students can make their own dressings from garden products.
Create a special classroom recipe book with ideas for creative and fun salads or other recipes prepared with garden produce.
Make your own stone soup! Have students each bring in one ingredient to add to a soup potluck. This might take a little coordination to make sure you have a variety of vegetables. Start a discussion with questions like: What is “community”? What are some examples of communities? Why is community important? What can a community do to help each other stay healthy? Think of your class as a community. What are some ways we’ve worked together to get tasks done? What skills and resources do we have collectively as a community?
Investigate vegetable prices in a supermarket. Track the amount of produce harvested in your garden and use the market prices to determine the value of your harvest.
Make fresh food persuasion posters. Research the nutritional content of some of your garden produce and challenge students to make marketing posters to ‘sell’ students on vegetables.
Food interviews. Have students partner up to interview each other about food. As a class develop a set of questions to ask, such as: What is your favourite vegetable? What do you eat for breakfast? What foods do you help prepare? Compile the answers on a chart. What do the answers tell us about the class?
Incorporating Indigenous Perspectives in
It is important in your classroom to acknowledge and celebrate the cultural identities of all students represented in your learning cohorts. It is particularly important in a Canadian context to acknowledge Indigenous perspectives into your classroom teaching.
There exists a great opportunity through working with plants and soil in your Little Green Sprouts garden, to infuse Indigenous perspectives, world-views, experiences, stories and imagery into your student’s learning experience. Many Aboriginal world-views are centred on observations of nature and trying to learn the lessons that plants, animals and natural systems can teach us – something we want to encourage all Little Green Sprouts students and teachers to do. Developing the ability to truly see what is happening in the environment is the fundamental skill of understanding.
The worldviews of the First Nations of Canada and Métis people, as well as their contributions to science, technology and ecology are now being acknowledged and incorporated into educational programs across the country. “Two eyed seeing” is an important concept: a western perspective has something to offer, but Indigenous perspective has equally important offerings. As educators, we must recognize and embrace the important roles we can play in addressing the need for reconciliation and overcoming the legacy of colonialist and assimilationist schooling.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015), has two Calls to Action that we feel are particularly important to the Little Green Sprouts program. They are to “integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms” (Action 62) and the call for “building student capacity for intercultural understanding, empathy and mutual respect” (Action 63).
Incorporating Indigenous Perspectives in the Garden.
View or download a 2-page overview from Little Green Sprouts.
When planning for inclusion of Indigenous cultural concepts in teaching and learning situations, there are a few points to consider:
It is important to recognize the diversity of Canada’s Indigenous peoples and to focus on both the traditions and contemporary lives of the Indigenous communities in your area.
Educators are encouraged to seek the guidance of local community people who are most knowledgeable about the appropriate use of cultural concepts specific and/or unique to their communities. There may be personnel in your school district – Indigenous consultants and/or those responsible for Indigenous education – who can help find out what resources are available to assist your teaching.
You might consider inviting an Elder or a Métis senator as a guest into your classroom to connect their knowledge with your garden. Some Indigenous keepers of knowledge are more comfortable being called ‘knowledge keepers’. Be sensitive to their preference. It is important to acknowledge visiting Elders and their knowledge, as they are recognized by their communities as esteemed individuals.
When referencing Aboriginal content, give learners a chance to work with locally developed resources (including local knowledge keepers) wherever possible.
Reflect on why introducing Indigenous perspectives into your teaching is important. Some reasons to incorporate Indigenous perspectives include: helping develop positive self-identity for Aboriginal youth by learning their own histories, cultures, traditional values and contemporary lifestyles; helping all students increase knowledge and understanding about the cultures, traditions and perspectives of Indigenous peoples; helping eliminate stereotypes that exist in mainstream and non-mainstream cultures.
Bring Inquiry-based Learning to Life in the Garden!
What makes a seed a seed? Do all plants need the same things? Can plants grow in the dark? Questions like this naturally sprout in a classroom garden. Nowhere is an inquiry-based learning approach more appropriate than when working with nature, plants and composting.
We encourage all teachers to use their classroom garden as a springboard for investigative, student-centred learning. Your Little Green Sprouts garden can become a living laboratory where student inquiry, problem-solving, and decision-making drives ‘hands-on, minds-on’ learning. Your garden provides a rich, context to inspire curiosity, enthusiasm and inquiry-based activities.
View or download the LGS Inquiry-based Learning Infographic to the right
Inquiry-based Learning Infographic
Download or view for evidence-based ways classroom gardens can inspire inquiry!
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Inquiry-learning Continuum
We understand that there are many approaches to inquiry-oriented learning and teaching, and that an educators’ comfort level with such approaches are varied. Students and teachers new to inquiry may prefer teacher-led inquiry, while those more familiar may look to utilize the garden to prompt more open-ended inquiry. Our hope is that your LGS garden will meet your instructional goals and student interests through offering many opportunities for inquiry learning.
Structured & Confirmation Inquiry. A teacher new to the approach might supplement traditional science instruction with opportunities for guided inquiry. In this case, the teacher outlines procedure, provides materials, and structures the activity so students can discover specific relationship or concepts (e.g., what’s inside a bean seed).
Guided Inquiry. As a next step along the continuum toward a more student-directed approach, a teacher may give students a problem to investigate, but allow them to determine the procedures and methods (e.g. find out whether plants need light to grow).
Open Inquiry. In the fullest implementation or an open-ended inquiry, students identify meaningful questions, design investigative procedures to answer them, and reach conclusions based on their evidence (e.g. Would plants be able to grow in the conditions that exist in a space station).
Gardens can inspire Growth Mindset!
There is a saying, “Your mind is a garden, your thoughts are the seeds. You can grow flowers, or you can grow weeds”. We can tend our minds, just as we tend our gardens, but instead of growing carrots or tomatoes, we grow our brains (or the synaptic connections between neurons to be more specific!).
For many people, the brain is a mystery. For years it was assumed that intelligence was just something people were born with – that it was fixed. What new research shows is that the brain is more like a muscle – it gets stronger when you use it and it grows when you learn.
When Carol Dweck and her colleagues studied students’ attitudes about failure over 30 years ago, they noticed that some students rebounded while other students seemed devastated by small setbacks. Dr. Dweck coined the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset. When a student has a growth mindset, they understand that their intelligence and abilities could grow through practice, hard work and determination. A fixed mindset is the notion that intelligence is fixed and that it, along with talent, alone lead to success. With a fixed mindset, you believe you were either born with it, or you were not.
A garden is a great place to cultivate growth mindset in your students and is a fantastic metaphor for our minds. At Little Green Sprouts, we believe garden is a verb not a noun and that it’s the process of gardening that is most important and rewarding.
Social Emotional Well-being poster
View or download the poster for evidence-based ways that gardens can improve social & emotional well-being.
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Tips for tending our gardens and minds:
In our gardens, we must plant the right seeds. Remember, ‘your mind is a garden, your thoughts are the seeds – you can plant flowers or you can plant weeds’. The choice is ours!
Those weeds in our garden? They are negative thoughts that have taken root! If we do not regularly weed our garden, what we water will grow.
We can’t always control what seeds fall in our garden, but we can choose which to water with our attention. Just like a garden, your mind needs daily attention, and it’s your choice where to direct it.
When we make mistakes, it is like fertilizer for our minds. Challenges help our brain to grow!
Remember, all plants grow on their own time. We can’t force plants to grow, but we can create the best conditions for growth. We must be kind and patient with ourselves while we learn and grow. We don’t bloom overnight!
There are sunny days and rainy days – we can weather the storm. Sometimes learning and failing are so hard that they are almost unbearable, but if we persist we will grow stronger because of it!