New from the Wordsmiths

This Wordsmiths column features books on schoolyard design and school gardens. If you have found a book that you think other FOSS users should know about, please send the reference to foss@berkeley.edu, including author, title, ISBN, and a short annotation.

The books for this issue of the FOSS Newsletter were reviewed by Erica Beck Spencer, FOSS Developer/Outdoor Initiatives Coordinator.

How To Grow a School Garden: A Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers

By Arden Bucklin-Sporer and Rachel Kathleen Pringle. Timber Press, Portland, OR, 2010. ISBN: 978-1-60469-000-2. Adult. (Life Science Strand)

Be careful! If you crack this book open, you’re going to want to start gardening with students. The enthusiasm for school gardens in this book is contagious—you can feel it in the photographs of the students and adults working outside. The authors are the backbone of the well-established San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance and have successfully greened many of the schoolyards in San Francisco with outdoor classrooms or gardens, as well as lending support to others who started on their green schoolyard projects. The book is loaded with strategies for creating sustainable garden projects, helpful to-do lists, easy recipes, tricks of the trade, and of course great lesson ideas for K–8 gardening. “Salad Partyyy!” (as third-graders enthusiastically call it) is my favorite garden activity where students harvest from the garden, make a salad, and eat it, all while in the garden. My favorite gardening trick is to drill holes on the bottom of one-liter sized yogurt containers for young students to water the gardens. My favorite list in the book is titled, “What to do with a recalcitrant principal.” If you have already fallen in love with gardening with students, or if you want to begin a garden adventure at your school, you will not be disappointed with this book. The authors are experts on the subject of school gardens and will inspire and improve some aspect of your practice.

Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation

By Sharon Gamson Danks. New Village Press, Oakland, CA, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-9766054-8-5. Adult. (Life Science Strand)

Hands down, this is absolutely the most comprehensive book about greening schoolyards that I have seen, and I’ve seen most of them. The author’s work involves photos from unbelievable green spaces from 11 countries around the world and spans a decade of research. If you have an inkling of desire to do some greening projects in a schoolyard or are looking for inspiration for yourself or others, this book provides all the information you need, along with saving you time and money. It is loaded with gorgeous photos of students working and learning outdoors in spaces that are now teeming with life but were once barren asphalt. The teacher in me focused on the many ways to organize seating outdoors. Some are simple seating arrangements using tree sections in a circle or various ways to have amphitheater seating. There are also photos of artful and functional cob bench sculptures or the dual functioning flower-shaped concrete raised tree bed that also provides seating.

The book is brimming with integrated art projects that range from tile mosaics, painted asphalt, to willow sculptures. Often the art is functional and beautiful. These outdoor spaces are welcoming, provide ownership when created by students and parents, build community, and, of course, invite active learning right outside the classroom door. Concluding the book, Sharon Gamson Danks writes, “The examples in this book are intended to help you envision what is best for your school, to help you avoid ‘reinventing the wheel.’ Use this book as a springboard to develop your own ideas or tailor those you have read about to reflect your own school community and its geographic location. Dream of the schoolyard you would like to achieve and then help to shape this reality at your school.” Asphalt to Ecosystems provides a wealth of information about how to create effective and beautiful spaces while simultaneously truly inspiring everyone to get out there and start building. Looking at the pictures of this book makes me want to get over to my kids’ schoolyards and start working—and as a full-time working mother, that’s saying something.

In Memory of Gorfman T. Frog

By Gail Donovan. Illustrated by Janet Pedersen. Dutton Children’s Books (Penguin Young Readers Group), New York, NY, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-525-42085-9. Grades 3-6. (Structures of Life Module, Environments Module)

After playing the OBIS Food Chain Game with third graders, a student told me about a novel in which students played a very similar game. The main character, the adventurous fifth grader Joshua Tree Hewitt, is often getting in trouble for talking too much. While trying to avoid getting into any more trouble before school one day, he stumbles upon a frog in the pond near his house. Not just any frog—a five-legged one! In order to win some much needed approval from his teacher, he brings the frog to school. The entire class falls into deep adoration for the frog and unites together to uncover the mystery of the frog’s fifth leg. This is the kind of book that will make students beg for you to read to them. Third- through fifth-graders will gobble it up as fast as I did.

After students have enjoyed reading the book, they may be interested to learn more about the book, the author, and her writing practice. Check out the interview with the author in this newsletter. You can make copies of the interview to share with your students by downloading the PDF of this newsletter. If you have any comments or ideas about using this book and any of the other books reviewed in this issue, you can send them to Erica at ebspencer@berkeley.edu.

Curricular Connections

Want your students to really understand what a food chain is? Check out an OBIS simulation game called Food Chain Game at http://www.outdoorbiology.com/node/42. If you’re teaching the Structures of Life Module, you may want to introduce the game by talking about the food chain of a crayfish. Focus question: What is necessary to create a balanced food chain?