READY TO GET OUT IN THE GARDEN? We would love to welcome students back to the garden to complete their usual spring GTT lessons. All lesson materials can be found on your school’s private page on our website. For login information, refer to the Spring Kickoff email, ask your school’s garden parent(s), or email lindsey@gardentotable.org. Please sign up on our lesson calendar by February 26th so that volunteers and staff can ensure that the garden and materials are ready for your class!
SCHEDULING NOTE! Spring planting and harvesting tasks take a lot of coordination behind the scenes! In order to make this work for all of our schools, we have specific date windows for lettuce planting (1st grade), lettuce harvest (2nd grade) and summer planting (3rd grade). Your dates can be found by logging in and clicking on your school’s name.
NOT SO SURE, BUT WANT TO GET OUTSIDE? If you’re wanting to think outside the box a bit, we would love to support you in some creative ways to take advantage of your garden classroom. Here are some suggestions:
- If one grade level can’t take on a garden task like planting or harvesting – especially if volunteers are not able to be on site – perhaps another (older?) grade wants to do it.
- Let our videos be your guest teacher, then take your class out to explore. No password is needed to access these videos, so links can be easily shared for virtual learning. More spring videos will be made as gardens awake, and fall videos may happen to align with your curriculum this spring. (Lots more resources to share at the bottom of that webpage!)
- Speaking of exploring, maybe what your class needs is to just get out there and observe and investigate. This “I Wonder, I Notice, It Reminds Me Of” activity, based on the work of the highly-regarded Beetles Project, from The Regents of the University of California, is a great way to get your class out into the garden for 15 minutes or more of exploration in the garden. (Or any other outdoor space with things to observe!) This is a great way to engage curiosity, to introduce an academic concept, or to just get your students outside!
The key to making this work across our program is COMMUNICATION. Providing meaningful garden-based learning activities for an entire school takes some challenging calendar wrangling. (It’s part of what makes our program a success!) The last thing we want is for anyone to feel frustrated by heading out the garden only to learn that the lesson or activity they had in mind won’t work. If you want to take a different approach, please reach out to our Program Director (lindsey@gardentotable.org) and/or your school’s garden parents (login for access) so that we can best support you with any modifications!