Working in teams of four, students act as botanists and use non-fiction on-line text to conduct Self Organized Learning System (SOLE) research to uncover the needs and life cycle of a plant for the school garden.
In this engaging unit, students will design and plant a square-foot garden that will be their central tool.Through the growing season, they will explore nutrition content in their everyday lives and see how it relates to what they are growing.
Students explore the school garden to make observations and inferences about which plants thrive in the current environment and which plants may decline or even perish. Students then generate scenario cards to describe situations where plants or humans thrive, decline, or perish. By constructing and monitoring an “Earth System in a Bottle”, students investigate which environmental conditions are needed for plants to thrive.