Grow House
One of my colleagues shared the Grow House with me at a PAAE (Pennsylvania Association for Agriculture Educators) meeting. As soon as he showed this to me my wheels started spinning in my mind. How can I make this permanent? Can I connect this to the community? What about agriculture literacy?
This project grew into a Community-Based Service Learning project that I carried out at my coorperating center. I taught my plant science students a fifteen day unit based on plants and gardening. I had a guest speaker from PSU Pesticide Education come in to inform the students about IPM (Integrated Pest Management) and I brought in two Master Gardeners to tell the students how to test the soil, when to plant and how to prep the soil for gardening.
The students then created four workshops that they taught to 64 third graders. There workshop topics where: How to Grow a Plant, Parts of a Plant, Farm Safety and Farm to Food. These agriulture literacy workshops was all student driven. They did everything! I just gathered the supplies and arranged the time with the 3rd grade teachers.
After the workshops students stayed after school with the Master Gardeners to assemble the Grow House on the elementary school playground and prepare the soil for planting.
Shortly, we will plant the vegetables in the Grow House garden. The agriculture education students volunteered to pull weeds, water and harvest the vegetables over the summer. All the vegetables grown in the garden will be donated to the local food bank.
This was a really great project to do. After the assembly of the Grow House, the next day the students came in and wanted to expand it! The response I received from this learning project was overwhelming in a good way.
No comments:
Post a Comment