Inlet Classroom

I keep tinkering with my outdoor classroom ideas. I know what resources I get to start with and have had a bit of extra time to think. I’ve also had several years experience gardening with kids to draw on. I really want this to work!

My most successful gardening years came when I taught K. During those years, I was not really worried about growing something until it reached maturity. I wanted my K’s to play in the garden–planting, digging, watering, picking, munching and planting again. As a result, the garden was a pretty lively place. I didn’t have a huge garden space either (only 6 milk crates!), so I knew we weren’t aiming for any big feast. Still, we made good use of what we had and the garden was an important learning focus from the time following Spring Break until the end of the school year.

I was less successful at the intermediate level. For some reason, I was caught up in the idea that the plants needed to reach maturity. There was a flurry of activity at the start with all the planting and then….waiting. A bit of watering, but that’s it. Our climate doesn’t allow for many spectacular fruiting veggies to be ripe by the end of June, so the end result wasn’t super interesting (radish and spinach salad, anyone?)

This time, I would like the garden to be a place of continuous planting and munching, just like back in the good old kindergarten days. Here’s a drawing that I did recently to give you an idea about how I’m going to set it up:

While we wait for the planters to arrive (bought 3 from Costco), I’m going to work with the kids to plant seeds in little compostable containers made out of newspaper. These will be planted in one of the three planters. We will also buy some plants this year to give us a head start (cheating, I know) and these will planted in another planter. Next year, we will start these ourselves before the break. The final planter will have seeds planted directly into the soil. This should give us some interesting variation between the planters. We will start another round of seed planting every time we free up space.

This should allow for continuous garden activity. By the time June rolls around, we’ll stop planting and let the soil in the planters dry out. Then we’ll store the soil and the planters in the undercover area over the summer.

The more measuring, the better. I’m constantly on the lookout for interesting measuring projects. Here are a few that I am working on:

Maps. Kids like creating maps. My students created maps of their team’s fictional homeland (in Social Studies). They had to mark out where specific resources could be found (clam beds, cedar groves, egg-collecting spots, etc) and the location of a village site. They had to calculate the area of each resource patch and the perimeter of the island. They also created a map scale and marked out distances between their village site and important places in their homeland.

By the way, I highly recommend that you create cm grid transparencies. These are very handy for measuring the area of irregular spaces. More than that, they are an excellent scaffolding tool for students who need to see that 6cm x 7cm = 42 cm squared. I have them at the ready whenever I’m helping those less-confident students.

Floor plans. Start by researching and creating a model house (always fun). My kids used the SFU Time Immemorial site to research the inside of a Coast Salish longhouse. We are currently working on models and they are having a blast. Next comes drawing out a floor plan. Of course, kids will be measuring parts of the house (length, width, height) and calculating the areas of important spaces. They need to calculate house perimeters and estimate the size of the potential classroom village site. Scale is an important concept in this project as well.

Time Schedules. There is always opportunities for kids to create schedules, whether for special days (like Valentine’s) or ordinary days with some flexibility in the schedule. It seems simple enough, but is an excellent test of a student’s time measuring skills. The nice thing about a school day is that events must fit within the strict parameters of a school’s schedule. This means event durations must add up properly and conform to the start times of recess, lunch and the final bell. Plus, there is a cross-over between am and pm. Students can record times in both standard and 24-hour time. I have a nice standard scheduling sheet that students use for any scheduling activities. It is very versatile and I am willing to share it with you!

Here are a few links that will come in handy:

Petsmart

Walmart

Bosley’s

Real Canadian Superstore