The Garden as an Integrating Context for Learning
Building cross-curricular connections year-round with sustainable food production By Tara Laidlaw
across multiple subjects all year-round. With some creative cross-curricular collaboration, teachers can use a garden’s primary function — growing food — as an easy hook for stu- dents, creating immediate and obvious relevance to students’ lives. This article describes two examples of agriculture-based
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programming, each of which takes place in the context of a teaching farm located on-site at an Outdoor Education and summer camp facility. One example is a short activity designed for single-visit fourth- and fifth- graders, while the other is a year-long project designed for high school students who visit the facility throughout the year. Both activities are highly flexible and adaptable for use in other contexts.
FTEN PIGEON-HOLED as warm-weather-only spots for teaching biology, gardens offer an end- less array of learning opportunities for all ages
Elementary school programming Soil Stewardship is a 1.5-hour class that is offered to schools participating in the overnight Outdoor Education program, and it takes place at the educational farm. With a focus on healthy soil as the foundation of sustainable food production, the class draws deliberate connections between food and sev- eral Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) core ideas, helping students recognize the relevance of those core ideas to their own lives. It also offers opportunities for students to engage with the NGSS practices in a new and memorable context. Specific NGSS connections for the Soil Stewardship class and for the year-long high school project are detailed in the appendices at the end of the article. One component of the class is an interactive demonstra-
tion called the Erosion Table, which includes a large tilted table divided into three compartments, each of which has drainage holes at the downhill end. The three compartments are all filled with the same soil, but each is topped differently:
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Courtesy of Wade Institute for Science Education
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