If I Had A Garden...

During today's final lesson in our investigation stage of our unit, I revealed to my students that next Thursday they were going to have the opportunity to work with the farmers next door and help them plant their spring fruits and vegetables. The students were thrilled! In preparation for their visit and as a wrap up to our investigation, I did a read aloud using this book, "Our Community Garden". I had no idea that this book was going to stir up such rich conversation between my students. They were making a lot of connections to their own lives and to other books, which as I mentioned was a skill we started working on, and started developing ideas about the community garden they were going to be working on, on Thursday. As an extension activity to the read aloud, the students and I created a chart called "My Community Garden". We wrote down all the fruits and vegetables that we would like to grow. Upon completion of the chart, students were to go to their seats and begin writing about the things that they would personally like to grow and why. Below is a picture of the chart we put together.

This was a chart my class and I put together based around the foods they would grow in their community garden.

Here is an example of what one of my students said they would grow in their community garden and why.

Over the next two weeks we are going to focus on learning about what a "food desert" is, why Newark has received that label, what it means to be "healthy" and why it's important and what the underlying effects of a "food desert" can have on the community.