Garden Based Education

The garden is a classroom at Dallas elementary schools

heide — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:48:53 +0000

“The school garden is a really good vehicle for kids to connect to nature and the community,” said Sobel, who spoke at a REAL School Gardens meeting at Dallas’ Alex Sanger Elementary School in late February. “And there’s a lot of good research supporting the notion that integrating places like gardens into lessons increases student academic achievement. So it’s not making choices between test scores and healthy outdoor living. A garden well-integrated into the curriculum can actually increase test scores.” click to read more from The Dallas News…

Garden Based Education at Lifelab

heide — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 08:14:18 +0000

Here are two other great resources for Garden-Based Learning Instruction. They can be found and reviewed here
The Growing Classsroom
This award-winning resource book for educators contains 480 pages of science, math, and language arts activities that you can do with your students in the garden. Activities are aligned with California Science Content Standards. Topics include soil, plants, cycles, ecology, weather, nutrition, and food systems. Also includes team-building and sensory exploration activities, organic gardening skills, and information on how to create and sustain a successful school garden program.

Life Lab Science K-5 Garden Based Curriculum
Life Lab Science Program offers teacher friendly, hands-on units that children can dig into! Recognized by the Smithsonian Institute as an “outstanding curriculum, ” Life Lab Science is a core curriculum which integrates earth, life, and physical science concepts within the context of a Living Laboratory school garden. Inquiry-oriented lessons, both outdoors and in the classroom, encourage students to ask questions and explore multiple solutions.

“Improving a child’s ability to focus on the task at hand can be achieved with relatively small change”

heide — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:47:08 +0000

Written by Nora Schutz, Berlin Germany
NEUROSCIENCE could do for schools what biomedical research has done for healthcare. That’s the conclusion of the Decade of the Mind (DOM) symposium last week in Berlin, Germany, to discuss how the latest findings could be used to improve education. click for more info

Hands-on Activities that Bring Math to Life

heide — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:08:48 +0000

Math in the Garden, This wonderful Book is developed through a partnership of
University of California Botanical Garden and Lawrence Hall of Science Berkeley, California.
This book is for Educator/Parents with students Age 5-13.

ISBN-13: 978-0-915873-46-3

Book recommended by Erika Thu for Halloween called Pumpkin Circle written by George Levenson

heide — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:19:53 +0000

PUMPKIN CIRCLE: The Story of A Garden.
The Story of A Garden is an award-winning video and picture book, produced by George Levenson. This project is designed to show elementary school children the miraculous cycle of nature in a backyard pumpkin patch. Pumpkin Circle is a 20 minute live action video narrated in verse by Danny Glover with original music by George Winston. The video shows the changes in the plants over the four seasons with seeds sprouting, flowers opening, bees buzzing, pumpkins growing, and jack-o-lanterns glowing. The picture book, also written in verse, is filled with dramatic color photographs and allows children to learn the story of this amazing plant at their own pace. The video and book are perfect for Fall pumpkin studies, Springtime planting, science, environmental education and language arts. Suitable for ages 4 and up. The book and video are also available in Spanish — EL CÍRCULO DE LAS CALABAZAS: Historia de un huerto. For more information and reviews visit our PUMPKIN CIRCLE website.
http://www.informeddemocracy.com/

The Garden-Based Education Model

heide — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:56:14 +0000

Model for Garden-Based Education in School Settings:
A Tool for Educators, Abbey Jaramillo, Executive Director of Urban Sprouts has posted their one-day training information online.

Use this model to plan and evaluate your program. As you plan your lessons, use the Program Design box as a checklist to make sure the overall program enhances the school’s curriculum, physical and social learning environments in as many ways as possible. Then use the Program Outcomes boxes to identify the impact you want the program to have on individual youth, the community and/ or the bioregion.

click here to learn more

Gardens are powerful educational tools

heide — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:06:15 +0000

Gardens are powerful educational tools, providing opportunities for children to experience the natural world as they develop strong academic skills and positive attitudes toward fresh fruits and vegetables, and learn important sociological skills that enhance the quality of their lives. Says one teacher from the Arnold Schwarzenegger Charter Elementary School in California, “Children demonstrated a better understanding of concepts and applied them in more sophisticated ways after having instruction in the garden.” The Sanders amendment funding the program was unanimously approved by the Senate, and it will now go through the conference committee process with the House of Representatives. I encourage you to contact your representatives in Washington to urge them to keep the funding for the program in the final Agriculture Appropriations bill. Please click here to send a letter in support of the funding. As you contact Congress about the bill, I recommend focusing on members of the conference committee, who are listed below. These are the members who will have the most sway over whether the funding is ultimately kept in the bill, and we anticipate that they will make their decision by the end of the September 2009. Thank you again for all of your help!

The National Gardening Association

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONACT:

Office of Senator Bernard Sanders

332 Senate Dirksen Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20510

(202) 224-5141

Learning is social, computational, supported by neural systems linking people

heide — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:56:18 +0000

Writing in Friday’s (June 17) edition of the journal Science, researchers report that this shift is being driven by three principles that are emerging from cross-disciplinary work: learning is computational, learning is social, and learning is supported by brain circuits linking perception and action that connect people to one another. This new science of learning, the researchers believe, may shed light into the origins of human intelligence.
click to read more…

Trying to learn how learning works

heide — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:50:51 +0000

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
“New insights from many different fields are converging to create a new science of learning that may transform educational practices,” begins a report led by Andrew Meltzoff of the University of Washington in Seattle. The review in the current Science magazine makes the case for psychologists, neuroscientists, roboticists and teachers combining to quietly create a new field that combines everything from how brains grow to how classrooms work into a new kind of learning research.
click here for more…

Assessing Kid’s Attitudes and Knowledge about Pollinators

heide — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:00:29 +0000

Skills they will practice: communicating, sorting, categorizing

Tape a large sheet of paper to the wall and record kids thoughts there.

Introduction

: “We are going to be talking about how plants and certain insects depend on each other and why it is important to us.”
Participants brainstorm

about all the plants they can name. Write the plant names on the chart. Here are some examples of prompt questions to begin the activity:

— What kinds of plants to you see around you? (in your yard, your neighborhood, at school)?

— Do you have vegetable gardens or fruit trees in your yard or neighborhood? What are some of the plants in these gardens?Identify relevanty characteristics

of the plants listed:

— Which of these plants have flowers?

— Do the flowers all bloom at the same time or at different times?

— Which of these plants produce fruit? At what time of year?

— Which of these plants have seeds? Where do we find the seeds?Identify insects

that are frequently found near the plants that have been listed and answer the following:
— What kinds of insects have you noticed around the plants?

— In what ways do you think these plants might be helpful to insects? Why do you think that?
— Which insects pay a lot of attention to flowers?

— Why do you think these insects are so interested in the flowers?

Add some questions to assess their attitude towards insects such as bees:

— What do you feel when you see a bee?

— What do you think bees are good for?

— What do you feel when you see a butterfly?

— What do you think butterflies are good for?

Congratulate participants

on all they know and have shared

“As we learn more about how plants and insects depend on each other, we will find answers to some of the things we were not sure about, and perhaps learn new things that will cause us to change our some of our ideas about plants and insects.”

A revised lesson from KidsGarden Newsletter, May, 2009