I have really wanted to use gardening as part of our homeschool for as long as we have been homeschooling. Both my kids are outside and helping around the farm just about every day, so why shouldn’t our gardening time also be life skills and biology. My biggest problem has been finding a way to structure it so it’s not just me hollering “Okay kids, were going out to the garden again to pick things, weed, and water,” or another lesson in seed saving from tomatoes while we are saucing them. Has anyone else ever felt this way? Most days the kids are bored, frustrated, and/or overly energetic – aka they don’t learn anything, because I don’t have any kind of plan.
Enter The School Garden Curriculum by Kaci Rae Christopher. (This book is amazing by the way! It gives full 8-9 week plans of gardening lessons for Kindergarten through 8th grade for fall, winter, and spring, complete with several downloadable worksheets per trimester. Each year focusses on a different topic – things like seeds, soil, etc.) The problem was that it is designed for classroom use at a school where all grades are working in a community garden on different projects that all work together. Each year builds so my next question was “where do I start?” In addition, they were growing some things that we don’t typically grow. (Since we have a home garden instead of a community garden, we only grow what we eat.) Here I was with a lot of great plans (which I really needed) but some confusion over how to adjust them to fit my needs.
I read through the book again with unit studies in mind and found a lot of things that either I have really wanted to start as projects around here or things that I thought the kids would really have fun with. My conclusion was to try to just pick a unit for each season and be fine if we jumped all over the book. I reached out to the author and asked her for her advice on how to augment her book for our homeschool. She had a similar idea.
I handed the book to my kids and asked them to each pick a fall unit, a winter unit, and a spring unit. They both picked the same fall unit (win!) and on their own compromised on the other two (double win!!). This year, we are doing the 3rd Grade fall unit, which is all about the garden as an ecosystem, and the 1st Grade winter and spring units, which are mostly about seeds. The spring unit just happened to fit perfectly with our main science program this year, so yay!
I worked up a lesson plan for these 3 units and printed the corresponding worksheets. We are going to try to do 1 lesson each week from late September until we finish., probably on Fridays, which are usually our more relaxed day each week. Some lessons may need to get moved around depending on how different things in the garden are progressing – for example, I don’t know when my sunflowers will be ready to harvest seeds on and that is the second fall lesson.
I will try to post about our adventure regularly. Time to dig in and get our hands dirty! 🙂
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