The Outdoor Classroom
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The garden project plays a key role in providing a hands-on practical laboratory for many subjects in science as well as an important nexus for the integration of many different subjects. Because all students participate in garden projects, kindergarteners to eighth graders, they lend continuity to the science curriculum. While students maintain a connection with the plots they prepared, gardens they planted, and decorating the school grounds, they also look forward to the projects that increase in intensity and complexity as they mature at the school.
The Black Pine Cirlcle garden has become essential to our discovery-based science program. In preparation for planting early this last spring, students plowed under green manure, found the pH of the soil, and learned about the nitrogen cycle and the importance of replenishing nitrogen in soil. Basic concepts in botany, such as the difference between monocots and dicots, have been illustrated by the direct observation of the plants from seeds, through their first sprouting, to mature plants.
Students harvested tomatoes, cucumbers, fava beans, radishes, and hot peppers from the garden this fall. Extra cucumbers and peppers were turned into delicious PICKLES and consumed by students. A butterfly garden in the lower school helped teach students about ecology, as well as the life cycle of butterflies. The composter will become the central point of the unit on recycling of biological materials and mineral cycles. This spring the garden will serve as the stage for a unit on plant evolution. A watergarden will provide samples to help students discover the different functional parts plants had to evolve to become independent of the water.
The garden also provides many opportunities to integrate different subjects. The lower school teachers have been happy to use garden projects to enhance work in other subjects, or as a practical demonstration of concepts learned in class. In the upper school, the garden has provided the setting for cooperation between teachers' subjects. We will integrate art with science in the 6th grade this spring, by having students study botanical drawings, and then make their own sketch collection of various members of a plant family, using garden samples as their models. The California native plants, contributed by students to the lower school, serve as a lesson in natural history, as well as botany. Each class keeps a journal of the work they do in the garden, providing an opportunity to practice their language arts skills.
Black Pine Circle's garden provides a continuous outdoor classroom for subjects in botany, ecology, evolution, and natural history. It also becomes a focus for the integration of different subjects and the cooperation between subjects. But more than this, working in the garden gives urban students a rare opportunity to experience a concrete conection with, and an appreciation for the physical world in which they live.
Again this year, Black Pine Circle will be participating in the CUESA Open Garden Day on May 22, 1999. Please visit us: you can see (and taste) our gardening results!
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