Gardening is for everyone even if you don't have a place for a garden in the ground. Planning a school garden can be a lot of fun. It is a great place to learn-by-doing. Teachers, parents and students should help to plan the garden. Children can find out many things about seeds and bulbs before planting them. Growing plants indoors (in a sunny window in plastic pots or a heavy duty ziploc-quart or gallon freezer bag) can be safer and easier for children than gardening in “plain dirt” on the ground. When children sprout seeds, bulbs indoors, they can also find out about the first stages of plant growth.
Subjects:
* Interdisciplinary
* Arts/Visual Arts
* Arts/Music
* Science (Plant growth)
* Language Arts/Reading, Writing
* Mathematics/Measurement
- Get to know another Polish children from school and children from Slovakia and Turkey- children will get photographs and make voice recording – they will introduce themselves in English language.
- Collect a wide variety of seeds and bulbs to share. Send some seeds and bulbs to eTwinning partners. Cut apart some larger seeds or bulbs for the children to examine. Offer magnifiers for a closer look, and ask children to describe what they notice through the magnifiers. Suggest that children make sketches of the items you have cut open. Let children weigh and measure seeds and bulbs, or classify it according to size, color, shape, texture, etc. Let children make their own mosaic with seeds.
- "Colorful Vivaldi". Learn about the spring season - Antonio Vivaldi's "Spring" from "Four Seasons". Students listen to "Spring" and identify the signs of Spring in the song - with teacher's help if needed (first section is the trees, when music changes, it is the birds, then the trees again, then the river, then the trees, then the thunder storm, then the trees, then the sun, then the trees, then the sun, and the song ends with the trees). They also make own flower mandalas - radial symmetry design drawings. Sing and record chosen songs about Spring (Slovak, Polish, Turkish, English).
- Find out what the children know about gardening. Keep track of children’s ideas and questions on a web, list, or chart. You can add to it as they find answers to their questions. Invite botanists or gardeners to talk with the children about gardening. Help the children start some plants indoors. Locate it near a light source (window ledge, table or cabinet with grow light above, and/or small outdoor garden plot). Prepare the container. Plant the seeds or the bulbs (for example: Paperwhite Narcissus, cress). Allow freedom for the children to take risks, explore, make choices, be responsible and work together. Encourage the children to note, draw or photograph what they see.
- Photo Op Safari. Send students on a safari with pad and pencil to find and note or sketch several objects or areas in the garden that grab their attention. Next, give each youngster a cardboard frame at least 1 inch wide with an opening the size of a standard print photo (say, 4 by 6 inches). Have them return to their finds, this time to view them through the frame. Ask students to note the difference in how the scene or object appears when limited by the opening in the cardboard.
- An Eye on the Garden - Using Cameras. Try to capture the beauty and lush life of plants and their animate visitors with camera in hand. Take representative photographs of garden or habitats and use them to create a "garden tour" in PowerPoint or on the Web.
- Patterns and Math in Nature. Encourage youngsters to get very close to a plant and identify shapes — the circular center of a flower, a triangular leaf — and then step further back and take in larger shapes in the environment, such as a square garden bed. Patterns (things that are repeated) in nature - send students out, cameras in hand, on a hunt for natural patterns. They might uncover vein patterns in leaves, a repeated design on a flower petal, a spider's web, or the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower.
