Educators find gardening is a powerful pivotal instructional tool for challenging and channeling the physical, social, emotional, nutritional, and intellectual development of students.
Preadolescents possess the desire to improve the environment, the enthusiasm to envision new landscapes, and the physical strength to build them.Furthermore, middle schoolers enjoy working with their classmates on projects and will proudly display their emerging physical skills to peers, parents and teachers.
Gardening as an organizing thread for curriculum and learning in self-contained, departmentalized, or interdisciplinary teams enables the student to discover and organize his world. In Piagetian psychology the child is continually constructing reality and his modeling through representation is his way of coming to know. Creating and sustaining a school garden is a visual representation of mind at work.
Middle school gardening provides an ongoing portfolio of experiences for performance-based assessment. Gardening embeds assessment within the flow of activities.
Garden Variety Curriculum Connections
Gardening is an international language allowing non-English speaking newcomers to participate wholeheartedly in the many nonverbal aspects while learning and practicing conversational English.
Gardening provides the opportunity to grow plants native to the ethnic origins of students. Ethnic food gardens enable individuals to study and share their personal history and to understand and appreciate dietary differences of others. Throughout history garden plants have been used to cultivate diplomacy and friendship.
When social studies classes study World War II and find out that citizens of the US raised their own food because farmers were called to battle and farm machinery was recycled for weaponry, students can simulate the spirit of the homefront with a Victory Garden.
The school food garden links diet and health instruction. A school garden applies the USDA MyPlate directly by growing one’s plate in the garden. Nutrition gardens can be themed to specific chronic diseases of students and family members.
The physical workout of school gardening provides low-impact aerobic exercise while digging, shoveling, tilling by hand, hoeing, raking, weeding, and mulching.
Team building skills are developed since gardening requires cooperative planning, sustained commitment, and shared harvest. Gardening prepares preadolescents for the lifelong ropes course when as adults they collaborate with colleagues, congregations, and communities in problem solving.
The school garden compost pile is a learning center for units on Energy, Ecosystems, or Recycling. Math and science classes can graph air and soil temperature data from the garden and compare these temperatures to those inside the compost pile.
The construction, planting, and harvesting of a garden involves mathematical thinking involving measurement, number, operations, geometry, patterns, and data analysis.
In the study of the state’s natural history students can feature state rock and mineral specimens interplanted with native plants in a garden shaped like your state or along a historical style fence.
Animals visiting the garden or a unit on ethology can prompt theme gardens related to such events as monarch migration or native birds.
Art teachers engage middle school artisans in growing fiber and dye plants for weaving projects. During the study of French Impressionist painters art students could plant a painting.
Literature teachers challenge students to grow a Harry Potter garden or a Shakespearean garden.
Indoor gardening has endless possibilities. Under grow lights students can start seeds for the outdoor gardens and grow specialty crops like herbs to sell to parents, neighbors, restaurants, and at farmer’s markets.
An indoor plant hospital with emergency room and nursery can supply first aid to ailing houseplants and neonatal care to student propagation projects.
Match middle schoolers with plants and they are eager to start growing with you in the garden, indoors and out.
Sources
- Buchanan, Rita. The Weaving Garden. Loveland, CO: Interweave Press, 1987.
- Piaget, Jean. The Origins of Intelligence in Children. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1963.
- Pollock, Walter Patterson. Ed. How to Grow A Victory Garden. Chicago: Consolidated Book Publishers, Inc., 1942.
- Restuccio, Jeffrey P. Fitness The Dynamic Gardening Way. Cordova, TN: Balance of Nature Publishing, 1992.
- Turner, Lisa. Meals That Heal. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 1996.
Arlene Marturano - Arlene Marturano, an educator, consultant, master gardener, and writer advocates gardens as a context and gardening as a tool for ...
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