GARDENING: PK-3

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Jessica's Week
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​My plan for this week was to pair building and planting our family vegetable garden with a preschool garden theme. The problem is both these activities are labor intensive and pretty hard to accomplish simultaneously with a three-year-old. Thankfully I believe she will benefit from learning to cultivate food for years to come so I was ok with making it a second rate lesson plan.

We tirelessly planned, paced, measured and marked. Holes were dug and seeds were individually kissed before being tucked carefully into their warm dirt beds.  And the win of the week is a Pinterest worthy garden with raised beds, pebble walkway, and split rail fence.... executed entirely by my wonderful husband but since it's my design and T hand planted each seed it will henceforth be known as family project "homegrown with love". If it all grows that is 😳 

To learn more about gardening in the classroom we focused on the parts of a plant and differentiating types of seeds. By sequencing how a plant grows and then observing seedlings popping up in our yard and garden I felt like this theme really came to life for Taegan. Too bad we couldn’t make it all the way to harvest in a week! We categorized different seeds with matching Montessori cards and did some STEM building flowers from tanagrams. Taegans favorite activity was pretend play with various types of garden sensory bins. We pretended to be the farmers growing plants, then pickers harvesting, then had a market to sell our veggies. I really enjoyed the books we picked out for this week too. There's some great reads for this age group with regards to spring and gardening so head to the library if you can and pick a couple of these up!

A trip to visit the gardens of Phipps conservatory made a great field trip to compliment our lesson. They had a spring plant sale so we picked up some extra garden goodies and then played with friends in the observatory. This was our first time visiting and it didn't disappoint. While we didn’t complete as many learning activities as I had planned we did get a large garden up and running this week. Hopefully that will provide life skill learning all summer long!