Hello parents, today we took a break from the cerebral stuff and had a garden tour. We even got to try some of the plants including Turks cap flower, Beauty berry, Thyme, Basil, Monk’s pepper, Garlic, and Passion fruit. The kids loved it. We definitely need to add more edible plants in the garden so we can snack all year long.
Here’s the thing though our gardening budget is $346.05 for the rest of the year. We can definitely add more edible plants to our campus. I can selectively pick plants to increase our biodiversity. Picking one of each plant and planting them myself. It’s affordable but gives the kids nothing to do. Or we can spend a good portion of our funds on many of the same plants and the kids can each plant their own. We have 75 students in gardening total.
The first day we talked about gardening expectations. One of them is don’t dig up what someone else planted. When we planted our tomatoes. I set the tomatoes down saying everyone grab a tomato. I’m sure you can guess what happened next. The kids that paid attention grabbed a tomato and planted it. The kids that didn’t pay attention dug those tomatoes up and replanted them. I don’t enjoy playing judge at kid court. As you can imagine it’s quite annoying when twelve kids are arguing over the same tomato plant. We definitely need at least one plant per child but when I have 30 minutes and they finish planting, watering, mulching, and staking their plant in five minutes it leads to problems. So The more the merrier.
As it goes so far the kids love the garden tours, they learn a lot from it, and it’s free. But to keep their attention it’s something we have to reserve probably once a month to review. The kids also enjoy the presentation worksheet combo to a lesser degree. The presentation worksheet combo works great because we could pack tons of information into a short period and hold the children’s attention because it’s split between taking in information and recording it. This style of learning has limited time availability. Soon the office will be moved into the flex space and gardening won’t have access to the TV for our Canva presentations. This leaves three learning teaching methods left.
One, worksheets without a visual aid of a presentation. The kids hate this method and will straight refuse to participate. Two, sitting while I read to them from a book. This only works for a while before they lose interest and start playing cats or wrestling. Yes I do make them sit and separate them if they’re too distracted with each other. At a certain point though I’m reading to maybe four of twelve kids and the others are dissociating. You can tell them something and ask them, “what did I just say to you?” and you get back the blank eyed shrug. Three, activities like making flower pressing, flower dyes, paper, pots or something or another. Again this requires materials and thus funds. Less money than buying plants but still has a cost.
Housekeeping aside, I just wanna thank my parents for taking an active role in our students’ education. Thank you for using vocabulary at home. I was blown away today when Oliver interrupted class to let us know that the tree we were discussing is a deciduous tree. We haven’t even covered that topic yet. This is the type of thing that makes your gardening teacher feel warm and fuzzy. Because we aren’t just sending our kids off to be programmed, right? We are learning as a community. I’m the one introducing your children to botany and horticulture and you are reinforcing it at home. As I can tell we make a lovely team.
Anyway, today had amazing participation, amazing enthusiasm. I hope we have more days like this. Now I have to make myself a decoction from all the shouting, haha. I will be brewing one of our subject plants Echinacea purpurea. If you’re a teacher this is a solid remedy for a sore throat especially when combined with licorice or mallow root. If you’re kiddo had good things to say about today leave a W in the comments. If you think I’m doing a good job or if you like my lesson plans, put a W in the comments. This weekend I will be recording and posting the Asteracea presentation to thelifeskillsclub.com sign and go to your dashboard to take the class at home. Thank you and have a great weekend.