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Helping in The Abston Garden (Padlet Requirements)

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Helping in The Abston Garden (Padlet Requirements)

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Title of Center - Helping in The Abston Garden

Objectives - Students will be able to make observations about how young plants and animals are like, but not exactly like, their parents. Students will also be take care of plants with adult support and guidance. Students will be able to write informative/explanatory texts in which they name a topic, supply some facts about the topic, and provide some sense of closure.

Materials - Science notebooks, pencils, rulers, yard sticks, pumpkin seeds, zucchini seeds, watermelon seeds, radish seeds (kinds of seeds may change depending on time of year and farmer plans), Chrome Books

Center Directions - You all received a Checklist of everything that you will complete as a part of this center. First, you will get your Chrome Book and go to Clever. Log in and click on EPIC. Listen to 2 books about plants and gardening. I have assigned them to you already. The books that are assigned are at your reading level. When you look at the Checklist, you will see that you will help plant pumpkin seeds, zucchini seeds, watermelon seeds, and radish seeds in the garden. Our school farmer will help you plant these seeds. You will also be following directions on watering the seeds that you plant. Do not forget to check this off of your Checklist. Since it takes time for plants to grow, when you go to the garden, you will help water the seeds that you planted with the assistance of the farmer. Once the seeds have sprouted, you will be measuring how tall the plants are each week using the ruler and/or yardstick. Record your measurement in your Science notebook next to the date. You will have about 6 to 8 different measurements. Once you have these, you will record them and the date of each measurement in a bar graph. We will hang the bar graphs on the designated bulletin board in our classroom so that they are on display for the whole class to see. You will also write a paragraph about some of the things that you learned in the garden. Please make sure to write complete sentences. You will need a topic, 3 facts, and a closing sentence. As the final step on the checklist, you will present your writing and your graph showing how much the plants have grown since you started helping in the garden.

Evidence of Learning (assignments and assessments) - Students will be assessed on their participation in the garden. They will receive a participation grade for helping the farmer plant the seeds and take care of the plants. My other students will receive a participation grade for the centers they participate in while these students are working on the Garden center. The students participating in this center will also be collecting the data on the plants and tracking their growth in measurements as an assignment. They will also be assigned a writing project where they tell 3 things that they learned through their experiences in the garden. They will be graded on their use of conventions and receive a writing grade for their writing piece. They will also be assessed on presenting the data they collected in the garden as well as what they learned to the rest of the class.

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The center will be called - Helping in the Abston Garden

This center will be available all year. It will be open for specific students but, our whole class will still visit the garden several times during the school year. I would open this as a center to the students in my highest reading group and early finishers first.

This center will be a repeating activity. However, the students may be asked to do different things when they go to the garden depending on what the farmer needs and the time of the year that they are visiting.

This activity will be an ungraded enrichment activity for the students. Students will be able to use it during the mornings on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They will be able to visit the garden for up to 30 minutes. They can work on interpreting data they collected from the garden on the other days in the classroom. As far as space, we will have a dedicated half of a bulletin board to display information that they discover and learn from working at the school garden.

Accommodations - Checklists to help the students stay on task will be one accommodation. I will also provide quiet space for students to work. I will also keep the language as simple as possible so that students can understand what they will be doing and how to do it. Students will also be able to listen to and read books about plants/gardens in Spanish if necessary.

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I found many aspects of the readings helpful. Specifically, the part about school-based outdoor learning centers stood out to me. There are schools that come up with projects such as; butterfly gardens, bird feeders, tree planting, weather stations, plant gardens, and compost piles (Pfouts and Schultz, 2003).

Reading about these projects made me think of the garden at my school. My class recently got to go. The students were so excited because they got to help the farmer plant that day. I also found it interesting that in one of the readings it says that “developing appropriate curricular options for gifted and talented children in the early grades is difficult because students are still learning appropriate behavior for the classroom instead of studying content in depth (Pfouts and Schultz, 2003). I also found the “Official Learning Center Contract helpful. Specifically, I like how the students get to say what they want to study and list things that they want to find out about their subject. I found the four levels of learning centers helpful Specifically, the fact that there is a great deal of variety and flexibility in the way the levels of centers can be managed (Snowden and Christian, 1998). I also found the fact that through play manipulation during learning centers, students can learn many important concepts.