Garden Club: Welcome Back!
Winter break is officially over, and with the New Year comes new students and a whole new Garden Club!
While initially the team wanted to have one garden club a week on Tuesdays and one “open garden” activity time every Saturday, we quickly realized that we could engage more students if we made Saturdays planning times and added a second garden club to the week on Thursdays.
Once the recruiting was done and permission slips were all turned in, Garden Club had over 60 students signed up between the two days.
For the first Garden Clubs back, we decided to focus particularly on team-building activities with each group. During snack, we went to each student and asked them the “Question of the Day”: Where do plants absorb water from? Students dropped their answers, written on slips on paper, into a large bowl.
Students hold hands in a circle and try to pass a hula hoop around in a circle as a simple icebreaker
We decorated name-tags and did a quick name/warm-up activity where everyone held hands and passed a hula-hoop around the circle without “breaking the chain” (we did a version where everyone chanted the name of the person who was passing through the hula-hoop. A fun way to learn everyone’s names!).
After the quick name-game, we bundled up to head into the Garden. When Garden Club started in September, we used the entire first Garden Club to cover rules in the garden; the team tried to facilitate skits about our Garden rules, all the while correcting behavior. We took a more relaxed approach this time: when everyone was all lined up and ready to head outside, we chatted in a big group. A team leader asked the students some questions: Who’s been in the garden before? What are some rules you have in your classroom? Do you think some of those rules may apply to the garden (i.e. sharing, keeping hands to self)? What sort of rules do you think we have in the garden? By asking instead of telling, students were able to think critically about boundaries in the garden instead of just having to receive information. The Teens also noticed that Thursday’s Garden Club is mostly older students, in 4th or 5th grade, so they were able to keep focus and talk more critically about rules and boundaries in the Garden.
Jetzaly works her way through the Mission Impossible game
By keeping the conversation about rules more “casual,” we were putting more trust in students, assuming that when we "arrived” to a place where we’d have to cover more guidelines and boundaries- like when working with tools, for example- we would review those rules when we got there.
One student practices getting water close to the soil of the lettuce plant at the end of Garden Club
Our trust paid off. The students did fabulessly in the High Tunnel while they played “Mission Impossible,” a game where they had to maneuver through taut, criss-crossed red yarn lines between the raised-bed rows. the second round they went through the course, they had to so while watering plant roots in the beds. Before we began the game, but after we broke into “teams,” we chatted briefly about where plants absorb the water. SO many people think plants get water through their leaves! By having the student water only the roots as they wiggled and jumped through the simple obstacle course, the correct way to water plants was hopefully seared into their brains!
After answering the Question of the Day again (nearly everyone got it correct the second time around!), some Garden Club students harvested kale & cabbage to take home, showing off their new harvest to families.
Changes from Last Year
During winter break, the whole team reflected on the first semester Garden Club, averaging only 12 or so students per club, and thought carefully about improvements that could be made for the Garden Clubs beginning in January.
As discussed above, we resolved to add more students and recruited for Garden Club more aggressively in early January for the second term than we did in early September, when school started.
One major change was team organization; everyone picked a crucial role in running Garden Club. One teen facilitates sign out, one does “Question of the Day,” one makes sure necessary supplies are present and set up correctly for the club, and one organizes all the students to do a game at the end when waiting for family pick-up. After the first club in January, everyone agree this was a great way to delegate! From an educational perspective, this also gives each of the teens more agency over the time they spend helping run Garden Club.
Green Teens worked hard over Winter Break to come up with ideas for how to better Garden Club… but we may have taken some veggie pizza breaks, too.
We also added a “Question of the Day.” Rather than having students only journal freely at the end of each Garden Club, we wanted our learning objectives to be a little more targeting and specific. After we pick our activities for the week (for example, planting lettuce), we then decide on a Question of the Day (for example, what part of the lettuce plant do we eat?). We ask the question once at the beginning, during snack, and once at the end, when students are about to leave. If students finish their question early, or they don’t want to do whatever activities are being offered, they are always welcome to write, draw, or paste items in their Garden Club journal.