Lesson 3: The Curious Garden

I was so excited going into today's lesson, because I knew my students and I were finally going to have a discussion around changes they would like to bring to Newark. I began my lesson with a story using Message Time Plus to help give my students an idea of what our read aloud was going to be about. The message stirred up good conversation and caused the students to make a lot of connections, which is a skill we have recently started working on. Liam, who is the character in "The Curious Garden", decides we wants to make his dreary city shine! He decides to take action by planting flowers all over the city. My students were able to really relate to Liam, because they too lived in a "dreary city" and wanted to make it better. After our read aloud, I started a concept map with the question, "How can I make Newark better?" I reiterated the fact that Liam was a young boy who took big actions to make his city better and asked my students if there was something they wanted to change in their city. The conversation led to this concept map below.

This is the chart we put together after discussing the ways we can make Newark better.

As you can see, the most comments were listed in orange, which were related to health food initiatives. In green were comments related to helping people who needed it, particularly people without homes, and in blue were comments related to brightening up Newark and making it "prettier". I was extremely thrilled with their ideas and loved the fact that so many of them were taking what we knew about plants and applying it to the bigger picture. We took a break and went to lunch and picked back up with the conversation in the afternoon. During lunch I created a second chart, which grouped these ideas into categories. When my students returned, we reviewed the ideas we talked about and I explained to them that now we are going to take a vote on which topic is the most important to us. One by one, each student came up and put a tally mark next to the topic of their choice. The chart below explains our results.

This is a chart listing the 3 main ideas discussed among my students. As you can see, bringing healthier foods and places to Newark was the most popular topic

Most of the students were ecstatic to find out that healthy foods had won, but two students, who voted for topic number 1, were so upset that they cried. When I asked them why they were crying they said, "I really wanted to the help people with no homes, because I want them to come be a part of my family." I was honestly very moved by the empathy displayed by each of my students and explained to the class that all three of these topics are extremely important but voting was the fairest way to decide on a topic. I promised them that as our project continues we will do our best to help as many people as we can in our community. As our investigation came to an end, one of my students asked, "Ms. Stewart I think its important to help people get healthy stuff, but who are we going to ask to help us build a new supermarket or restaurant?" Before I could answer, another student yelled out, "We can ask our families to help us. I know my Grandpa can build us a new building." Another student then replied, "Let's ask the president cause he is in charge of the world!" I couldn't have asked for a better question or response! Its the perfect beginning to stage 2: Learning and Planning and stage 3: Action!