Transcript for School Gardens

Hi, I'm Angela Bianco, a 3/4 teacher out in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. And today I'm here to share some resources that I found on the Library of Congress website and are available to you to use on the Minnesota Historical Society website. So the set that I have today are primary sources that are all connected to school yard gardens and gardening specifically.

So one thing I like to do at the beginning of the year that connects social studies and writing is to use images for our see, think, wonder. And so what I do is I put up an image and we talk about what does it mean to see, just observe, not make judgments about the things that you're seeing in the photograph.

But what do you notice? Are there people in the photo? Like where are they? Then we write all those things down and I give them a minute and then we move to the think based on the things that you saw, what do you think is happening in the photographs? So we talk about this as inferencing, and then finally we get to the wonder Who are these people? Where are they? What are they doing? What brought them to this place? 

So that's an easy way to get students just looking and observing photographs and then also connecting it to writing. One way to do this, just to save a little bit more time is to put them up and do a gallery walk and have students in groups of two or three and give them different colored Post-it notes.

And I have them say the things that they see on one color, think on another, and then questions on a third color. From there, in fourth grade, we have a standard that talks about technology over time, and gardening is a great place to look at that or farming is a great place to look at that. And so I would look at some of these photographs and talk about, you know, what do you notice about the tools that they're using?

Who's doing the gardening? Where are they doing the gardening? And once you've built on that idea of see, think, wonder, they're able to really use those observations and build their thinking off of that. So say, I think they're in a city because of the skyline behind them. Who's doing the gardening? So has that changed over time as you're looking at the different photographs of where people are doing the gardening and you know, how many people get to do the gardening so we can look at the tools and the people over time.

And then these images, I think, are really interesting because they're, you know, posters from the government about encouraging people to get out and garden at their own homes and schools. And so we might ask the question of why would people be encouraged to have gardens at their homes and what would lead to that? The last piece, I think is a really cool connection that you can make with students in the fall, in the spring, as many of them are starting to garden in their communities, at their homes and schools, is take some contemporary photos or videos about them or other places where people are doing gardening now and what has changed and what has stayed the same. So to really compare and contrast those, enjoy these resources, there's lots of great conversations and best of luck.