How Does Your Garden Grow??

I blogged about this awhile back but in case you missed it...
I am part of the teacher team at my school in charge of a grant that we are to use for a garden. Beautifying our school grounds is also included in the grant. We have been working with the second grade class once a week to begin planning it. It has been so much fun to hear students' ideas and their questions and what they think we need to do. The sky is the limit with them. One suggestion was to turn our garden into a jungle safari...

We decided as a class that something we needed to learn more about is native plants because no one wants to have to come to school in the summer to do tons of garden maintenance. I was stumped to find any resource to use to teach first graders about native plants not just in general but also about individual plants. After researching and searching I stumbled about a local conversation district garden native plant sale and was able to create native plant cards for students to use.

After all the searching for resources the outcome turned out better than expected. Students were split into groups and focused on one aspect of native plants that we needed to know to make decisions about what to have in the garden: soil, how tall they get, what they attract, and if they need sun or shade.

Here are the results:

Soil group. Good thing Michigan has sandy soil.

This group decided more areas were needed to sort out the plants.

I am proud to say my students are excited about planting and making the garden. We just did a school wide survey and one of the suggestion was we need to include a monkey flower. I am almost positive one of my firsties wrote that down as they were amazed to find a plant called Monkey Flower and Old Man Whiskers (and that do look like whiskers) when we did our research.