Students as Gardeners

Most elementary students, who spend long stretches of their day sitting in desks, are just itching to get outside. Though we may not think of gardening as a traditional part of the school day, gardens offer educators a unique chance to engage young, curious students and teach them valuable life lessons outside the classroom. With a little creativity, teachers of all subjects can find fun, easy ways to use a school’s garden as part of their curriculum.

Image courtesy of http://schoolgardenweekly.com

Aside from the structured lessons that can be taught through planting and tending a garden, students will likely come away from the experience with enriched social and personal values.  For instance, in classes where students are tasked with tending a garden over a long period of time, they will learn to practice teamwork, patience and responsibility – traits that can be challenging to develop within a classroom. You may find students who struggle in the classroom opening up and flourishing in the garden environment.

While some school gardens are quite large and elaborate, small spaces like a wall or fence can provide the same great learning opportunities. If your school has an underutilized outdoor space, big or small, and you’re interested in starting a garden, there are a plethora of online resources available to help you plan and get started. Below you’ll find links to a few particularly helpful websites:

MyHealthySchool.com – A step-by-step guide to getting started

School Garden Weekly – Information about available school garden grants, and a listing of activity ideas by grade level.

Kids Gardening – More information about the benefits gardening provides to students

Do you think your students would enjoy working in a school garden? Share your thoughts here.

    Posted by Ellen
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    Celebrating School Library Month

    Image courtesy of www.ala.org

    April is School Library Month, a time to recognize libraries and librarians, as well as school media centers and school media specialists. The month-long celebration happens at a great time in the school year. After all, at this point students and faculty can both use some out of the ordinary events to stay motivated and engaged through the end of the year. Here are some ideas for making this year’s School Library Month memorable:

    1) Challenge students to a poetry contest – Select a theme that will resonate with students and let their poetic creativity lead the way. Make age-appropriate poetry books readily available to help get your young writers started.

    2) Create a library scavenger hunt – Encourage healthy competition and help students discover library resources they may not be aware of. Whether your library is digitally driven, full of thick reference books or a mixture of both, students will have fun and probably be surprised by some of the resources in the collection.

    3) Host an evening at the library – Give parents a chance to attend an open house at the library along with their children. Create an atmosphere that’s warm and inviting. Help parents understand what the library can offer their students in terms of literacy and research support.

    The activities listed above are a great fit with the American Association of School Librarians theme for this year’s School Library Month: You Belong at Your Library. Be sure to visit its official site for more information and suggestions on celebrating all month long. How do you plan to get students involved in School Library Month?

      Posted by Ellen
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      National Pi Day

      It might be obvious to point out that Pi Day is coming up (March 14, get it?) but it’s the perfect opportunity to teach students about this mysterious number that’s been around since antiquity. It’s a chance to celebrate arithmetic in a way that even non-mathletes can appreciate. From games to sweet treats to crafts, here are some fun ways to learn about pi that students won’t even think of as work.

      Let Them Eat Pi
      Students can use pi to determine the areas of circular objects around your classroom like clocks and stools. To make it more fun, give them cookies or even pi pie to measure, along with the plate it’s served on. They’re bound to think more fondly of geometry if they associate it with sweet treats.

      Everyday Pi
      Find ways to work pi into everyday life so that students have context for it, such as this clock that expresses time in terms of pi. Students already know the numbers on a clock, so replacing them with this gives them simple math problems for which they already know the answers.

      Pi on the Wall
      Many schools find ways to express the infinite nature of this irrational number. Students can post the sequence of numbers around their classroom walls to learn what comes after the standard 3.14, or you can get the entire school involved and post number trails down the halls. Bracelets with beads for each digit and paper chains are other options.

      Multi-DisciPInary
      There are a bevy of pi-related puzzles to do on Pi Day. You can even sign up for the Pi-Day Challenge. And just because pi is a number doesn’t mean it has to stay in the math realm. Students can research pi and turn their findings into poems, songs, skits or artwork. Projects like these can make both left-brained and right-brained students happy.

      For any year-round schools that can’t get enough pi, there’s also Pi Approximation Day on July 22.

      Do you have any Pi Day customs? Do you have educational activities for other non-traditional holidays?

        Posted by MaryKate
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        The Importance of Being a Good Teacher

        Anyone who’s ever had an excellent teacher can tell you how their lives were enriched by that person. Until now, however, there hasn’t been a simple way to determine the impact of good teachers on the lives of their pupils. Enter three economists from Harvard and Columbia, whose new study has determined the financial contribution that high-quality teachers have on students over a lifetime.

        This far-reaching study examined 2.5 million students over a 20 year period, allowing the researchers to get a better idea than ever before of just how much value good teachers can add. The results of the study are based around “value-added ratings” of teachers throughout the country, a slightly controversial means of judging the effectiveness of teaching methods. The main criticism of value-added scores focus on the inability to account for outside factors, such as student backgrounds, parents’ influence and economic factors.

        Despite the skepticism on the part of the researchers, however, they found that teachers who were consistently rated as adding positive value actually had a bigger impact than imagined, even when taking into account external forces on students. Unlike previous studies that looked only at test scores, the economists took a broader view of all aspects of the students’ lives, even after they had left school. They found that students who had good or even average teachers reaped enormous benefits like higher average pay over a lifetime and lower chances of teen pregnancy.

        The conclusion of this study demonstrates that good teachers not only improve their students’ financial prospects, they have a positive influence on all aspects of their lives. On the flipside, bad teachers can set students back years in their development. Regardless of your ideas on value-added ratings, this study backs up what most people have always suspected: great teachers have an impact beyond the classroom.

        To read more about the Harvard study, visit http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/value_added.html.

        Have you had a teacher that had a great impact on your life? In what way? Let us know below.

          Posted by David
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          Bye Bye Backpacks?

          Image courtesy of Todd Davis/The Tampa Tribune

          Most of us can remember lugging heavy, textbook-filled backpacks home for nightly homework marathons, and it wasn’t fun. Perhaps you’ve even watched with guilt as your own young kids or students struggle under the weight of an overloaded book bag. Believe it or not, students of the near future may have little use for those cumbersome backpacks. Digital textbooks are noticeably creeping into classrooms, while traditional textbooks may be on their way out; five percent of all textbooks acquired by schools in the fall of 2011 were digital.

          Often when we think of digital books, we think only of a book that is read on a computer or e-reader screen rather than paper pages. However, in the case of digital textbooks, there is much more to it than that. Although digital textbooks are a fairly new technology, they are evolving at a staggering rate. Not only do they contain the textual information found in traditional textbooks, they also feature multimedia components like embedded videos, animated graphics and hyperlinks to useful, reliable information on the web. Most recently, teachers are discovering opportunities to pull together material of their choosing and create custom textbooks for their classes (School Media Specialists can be a great in-house resource for teachers interested in creating textbooks.)

          Of course, there are many questions that must be answered before digital textbooks become the norm in U.S. classrooms: How can access be guaranteed to all students? How is student performance affected by digital textbooks? Will schools take the leap by making such a drastic change to their curriculum? Some schools, like Clearwater High School in Florida, already have. During the 2010-2011 school year, the school spent $390,000 of its technology budget on Kindle e-readers and digital textbooks for every student. Other schools in Florida will soon have to follow Clearwater High School’s lead, as Florida schools are required to spend 50 percent of their textbook budget on digital materials by the 2015-2016 school year. This trend towards digitization stretches far beyond Florida, though. California and Texas are also actively working towards increased use of digital textbooks in their classrooms.

          How do you feel about digital textbooks? Are you excited by the freedom they offer, or overwhelmed by such a big change?

            Posted by Ellen
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