Getting Our Hands Dirty in the Learning Garden

This spring at Saint Luke School, our preschool students were learning about how we have to cooperate to share resources. We have been modeling this concept in the classroom all year but this spring, the concept really came to life through our IB PYP unit. We had garden lessons taught by a Seattle Tilth representative about sharing resources in our school garden, sharing the produce we harvest, and sharing our class compost with the worms in our worm bins. We shared math manipulatives as our class estimated the rate of growing plants. We tied the importance of composting with the importance of recycling and sorting trash. Each lesson we finished with asking the students why this mattered to our daily lives. Students brought their learning home and even at 4 years old, we saw them taking responsible action.