It’s that time of year when Daisy starts to feel a little restless. She can almost smell the damp, earthy aroma of spring and when she closes her eyes she can picture the shoots of bright green that will soon be poking up through the soil. Spring is nigh! So what does she do to quell her impatience? She starts to plan her garden!
Garden planning is an exercise in matching creativity with functionality. With young children, you can draw from math, language arts and science curriculums, while providing experiences that impart a host of skills useful throughout life—skills that foster positive habits related to emotional health, nutrition, exercise and community involvement, among others.
To start, it helps to begin at the end: What are your goals for this year’s garden? You’ll plant with your students in the springtime, but will you also want to reward them with a “harvesting” experience before school closes for the summer, or the following school year when children return to school, or both? Are you planning a flower garden for pollinators or a vegetable garden for eating? Choosing a garden focus now helps narrow the task and ensures a more successful, measurable result later.
For example, growing flowers for pollinators requires you to identify species of flowering plants that are typically visited by bugs and other pollinators native to your area. Growing pumpkins for next fall requires you to sort through different varieties of pumpkin seed, identify a type that will produce fruit in time before your first likely frost. You will also have to plant the seeds in a space that allows for vine growth and avoids overcrowding. Each focus offers its own unique curricular opportunities as well. Pumpkin gardening is rich in measurement opportunities, while pollinator gardening might be more focused on scientific investigation and habitat needs.
There are environmental factors to consider next. How will you facilitate watering, should rainfall be scarce? What is the soil, sunlight, and climate like where you live? Just like Goldilocks, different types of plants need different average temperatures that aren’t too hot or too cold, but just right (for them) to thrive. And they need the right temperatures for a long enough period of time to allow them to produce seeds. Some kinds of plants are limited to specific climates; you can’t grow pineapples in New Jersey!
If your school is in an urban center, don’t let that discourage you. In Nature Cat’s season 2, episode Garden Impossible, Nature Cat and friends help a friend design a garden in the middle of the city, showing that gardens can be planted nearly anywhere with a little ingenuity and creativity. If you can’t plant directly into the ground, you can build a raised bed or use containers. If it’s hard to find a spot that receives six plus hours of direct sunlight, you can choose plants that do well with less sun.
For optimal gardening success, we strongly encourage you to choose plants that fall within your region’s hardiness zone, and for pollinator and habitat gardens, to stick with native plants. These plants are more likely to do well, and to attract the local animals you want to support.
Here are more ideas on bringing nature into your classroom!
The following resources are filled with engaging media clips, fun lessons and teacher features which captures how a fellow educator used the resource with their students.
1. Plants Got Moves
Guide your young scientists through an investigation in the sun's role in plant growth.
2. Nature Plant!
Use this exciting experiment to guide your young scientists in understanding how plants absorb water.
3. Parts of a Plant
Explore plants as your young scientists observe the function and role of the different parts of a plant.
4. We Like Worms
Daisy needs help getting her new garden ready for planting! Use this resource to dive into the importance of worms in gardening and our everyday lives.
5. Nature Cat Collection
Enjoy looking through these clips, story segments, interactives, and readers as you do your own exploring with the Nature Cat crew!
But regardless of your focus, as March ends and April begins, your garden is on its way to becoming a reality for you to share with your garden helpers while exploiting those “teachable moments” … and having fun! For our part, we can hardly wait for the ground to thaw so we can get started!
