Cultivating FOSS Connections to Your School Garden

By Karen Mendelow Nelson, FOSS Curriculum Specialist

Are you working on planning your school garden for this year? Making connections with the FOSS Program will help broaden your students’ science explorations of nature outdoors. Schools around the United States are greening schoolyards by implementing school gardens, outdoor classrooms, and schoolyard wildlife habitats. Working in the garden, using your schoolyard as an outdoor classroom, can offer benefits to the curriculum. Students build consideration and learn stewardship for the Earth, learn and apply science concepts, get exercise, practice cooperation, and taste healthy foods that they grow themselves. If you have some class parents who want to help your students in the garden, or if you’re lucky enough to have a garden teacher at your school, the ideas in this article will help you collaborate and make more in-depth connections to FOSS.

For kindergarteners, the garden provides a natural space to dig in the dirt and discover the wonders of nature. In the Trees Module, students explore and learn about the trees on campus and how to care for them. As an extension, each year the kindergarten could plant a fruit tree to both beautify and add a permaculture1 element to the school campus. Or, at the beginning of the school year, students could harvest and taste varieties of fruit from the school garden. For the Wood and Paper Module, students could incorporate wildflower seeds into the paper they make, then plant their paper to grow a perennial garden.

There are many more extensions for primary FOSS modules. In the Air and Weather Module, the class could set up a weather station in the garden that students monitor. On winter mornings, they could look for ice and melting patterns or dig under snow to see what plants are still green. In the spring, students could plant seeds indoors in pots and learn about keeping seedlings warm in a classroom window, cold frame, or small greenhouse. In the fall, for the Solids and Liquids Module, students could make solutions such as peppermint tea from mint grown in their garden to learn more about liquids and solutions.

During the Balance and Motion Module, students could try out balance experiments by walking along raised beds, stepping stones, logs, and playground structures. Students can use the garden to investigate the relationship between Insects and Plants. They might discover insects eating plants, hiding in plants, or getting nectar and pollinating. They might find that an insect has come in contact with a plant, by discovering some munched leaf corners, finding small insect homes in the form of webs between leaves, or locating little leaf galls. To investigate New Plants, you could start a potato garden. Potatoes come up every year, but can spread, so contain them in a structure like a chicken wire cylinder. For the Pebbles, Sand, and Silt Module, students can test the garden soil by shaking soil with water and letting it settle. Or students can sift dry soils with the sieves contained in the FOSS kit. Search your garden for the use of pebbles, sand, and silt in schoolyard building masonry, such as cement, walls, and paths.

For the Matter and Energy Module, you might want to harness solar energy outdoors by installing a solar pump in a pond or using solar cells to power motors. The garden is a great place to discuss how a plant transforms carbon dioxide, water, and energy through photosynthesis, into plant matter. Through photosynthesis, carbon dioxide, water, and energy are transformed into cellulose, sugar, and starch, providing us with building materials and food. You can see the results of this energy transformation by monitoring the progress of veggie growth over time and graphing it. You can also begin by reading the seed packet and then comparing that information with your data for how many days it really took for the seeds to produce fruit.

Students observe fava beans grow through their life cycle.

In the Structures of Life Module, after planting your bean seeds, you can examine garden plants and investigate their adaptations. Plants have specialized structural adaptations that help them grow. Examples are squashes with large leaves and prickles that help them grow on the ground and succulents that have waxy leaves to conserve water. Be sure to choose plants that grow well in your local environment. (Note: Fava beans are a fun plant to grow in the winter in milder climates as a cover crop. Fava beans go through their life cycle, and we’re provided with nutritious and delicious beans to cook and eat.) Select plants with interesting adaptations for students to investigate. Students can also examine the life cycles of insect pollinators to help make the connection that pollinators are essential for helping produce the food we eat. Harvest the whole plant, including the roots, to investigate the entire structure and system.

In the Environments Module, students can explore aquatic and terrestrial environments around your school. Maybe you have a pond or creek on your school property, close to your garden. Your class might participate in a local ecological restoration project to enhance habitat. You might want to create a “wild” area in the school garden as a study site to contrast between managed and wild plots. How did uninvited plants get there? What happens when a managed plot is left to go wild? Discover how water is collected or drained on surfaces in the schoolyard or do a survey of how much water your school uses for gardening.

Students observe their school's pond ecosystem over the seasons for the Environments module.

For the Mixtures and Solutions Module, you could experiment with fertilizer to learn more about the nutrient elements that plants require. Monitor plant growth to contrast plots where fertilizer is added and similar plots without fertilizer. Compost schoolyard plant and food waste to recycle the nutrients from decomposition. For the Living Systems Module, you might want to have each student test her or his pulse before and after doing a lot of digging when preparing garden beds for planting. Extend your leaf venation discovery outdoors to the school garden to find leaf patterns. For the Water Planet Module, track rain and see how fast water evaporates in the garden by setting out pans of water and mixtures of soil and water to compare and contrast bright sunlight and shade evaporation; this will also help you know what kind of watering schedule to use.

Students measure plants weekly to test growth with added compost vs. fertilizer solutions.

Whatever strategies you implement, we’re sure your year will produce some happy student gardeners, interested budding scientists, delicious food, and some small places of beauty in your schoolyard. If you have a success story from your class about how you connected your school garden to the FOSS Program, please share it with us by e-mailing foss@berkeley.edu, so other teachers can get super ideas to try in their garden.