Portfolio site for Elley K. – School Gardens

This week was the last week I spent doing garden recess at Lydia Hawk. Things felt bittersweet as this experience was wrapping up. I feel some sense of relief as I was beginning to feel the weight of running the recess program solo, I had no one join me this week. Throughout the week I felt really reflective of the time I have spent with the students here and the impact having the garden open has on them. I really hope that an Americore member will be present for the upcoming school year, as I think having the garden open year-round with a friendly ally must be monumental.

Overall, this week I felt a little overwhelmed with the recess program and garden at Lydia Hawk, I would have loved to see the program run in a ‘normal’ year with the proper amount of help and support of multiple interns and Americore members. I think a lot of organizations have a lot of rebuilding to do after the pandemic, and I hope the garden program will flourish again.

I spent my last day with my students constructing our largest faerie village yet as well as planting lettuce, kale, and rainbow chard. I will miss these students dearly and value the time I spent with them this spring immensely.

I spent Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon this week at Lydia Hawk doing garden recess. We have a lot of work to get done to get the garden ready for summer. With the students, we worked on clearing beds and planting the starts that were donated to us, grown by a high school horticultural class. Michaela’s plan is to plant as many fall crops as possible, pumpkins, squash, sunflowers, etc, in order to have a full garden when the kiddos come back to school. The planning that goes into planting school gardens is interesting and takes some forethought to avoid planting only summer crops and instead focus on spring and fall crops when school is in session. I wonder about the care and watering that needs to happen over the summer when school is out of session and as I understand it is often a factor that deters schools away from establishing school gardens entirely. A school garden program that was in my neighborhood in Portland had a summer camp program that came to the garden a couple of days a week to help take care of the school garden as well as continue to utilize it as a learning space. This of course was in a city setting with many neighborhoods within the public transport system with more accessibility, funded by an organization dedicated solely to school gardens. Nonetheless, it is an interesting idea to keep students engaged in the garden over the summer. 

Garden recess has been such a sweet and special experience for me and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with this school community. Initially, when starting this quarter I was most interested in the field trip program and did not know a lot about what the recess program entailed. Both programs are important and impactful in their own ways and I have really grown to love the accessibility and flow of garden recess. I think it is a beautiful way to give access to nature and the beauty of natural spaces in short fifteen-minute intervals throughout a regular school day. There isn’t as much planning and coordination that goes into organizing a field trip and students have the personal autonomy to join and leave the garden space as it feels right to them. The contrast between the asphalt playground where students usually spend their outside time and the albeit messy but beautiful garden space is really interesting. The garden is full of insects, worms, flowers, and things to taste, smell, touch, and observe. Mudpies to make stumps to balance on, things to build and destroy, and plants to give care to. Giving students access to this space even for a short interval of their school day is huge in this modern world where we live on the screen more than we live in the soil and in the mud. 

Friday morning I visited a kindergarten class at Mountain View Elementary, I joined them during their free time and lead small groups out to the garden boxes on their campus. We had observation time as we observed the process of making ‘worm food’ or compost, aka the cover crops we are allowing to decompose under cardboard sheets. We also explored and smelled the herbs growing in the garden, chives, sage, thyme, oregano, and lemon balm. The class remembered me from their field trip to the St. Marks garden and did a really good job listening and engaging with me in the garden. I was able to stay and observe the classroom for a while, the teacher is an incredible inspiration for me and has been teaching kindergarten for many years. I really appreciated the structure and organization that she uses in her classroom as well as the care and respect she gives her students. I think that having structure is incredibly important in those early years to foster a sense of stability and confidence. I have such a sweet spot for this age group and feel that my teaching ability comes alive when working with kinders. 

Overall the experience I had working with the Thurston County Food Bank school Garden program exceeded my expectations. I meet my learning goals of learning to teach elementary school students in two different garden education programs. I worked with students K-5 and developed deeper teaching skills by getting to work closely with various developmental stages. It was extremely valuable to have practice teaching so many different age groups at once.  Additionally, to dive further into my interest in early childhood education, I spent time in a Kindergarten classroom observing classroom management techniques and leading small groups in their on-campus garden. From my supervisor, I learned about the interworkings of running and developing school garden programs under a nonprofit organization. I ran a WordPress blog and was able to reflect on my experiences and record the work I did this quarter both through written work and photography. I created a lesson plan for the garden program and was able to implement it with various groups of students. This experience was invaluable and represents what I have focused on in my journey here at Evergreen. I was able to apply my past experiences in environmental education and step into a new sphere of teaching in garden education. 

This week I spent time at Lydia Hawk for the first time in a couple of weeks after focusing on the field trips and losing a week to being sick. The kids really missed garden recess and I felt some guilt for not being able to be there every day. It really has such an impact on the school at large and I hope the program will be revived and garden recess will be restored to its full potential. It feels really special to work with an entire school, Kindergarten through Fifth grade. I am developing a special relationship with so many of the students and feel that the interest in the garden has gone up dramatically and I am meeting and working with a large percentage of the student body,. It really hones in my teaching skills to be able to have a rapid-fire of so many age groups back to back. One recess I will have kindergartens and five minutes later third or fourth and then back down to first. I really value this experience and hope to work with this school past this internship. 

During recess, we spent a lot of time focusing on worms and weeding, as a team we also strategized some of the logistics of how we run the recess. Decided that in order to let in the largest population of the school in the garden we won’t have a limit or send students away during the fifteen-minute recesses and will have around 20-25 students in at a time. With a team member, this is surprisingly doable, we tried out splitting into teams and led group activities. While chaotic the large groups feel really special, and there is a deep sense of community and camaraderie as we do garden work with sometimes various age groups at a time. The students this week focused on exploring the garden and collecting worms, as well as digging, creating mud pies and faerie houses as well as weeding, and helping to prepare beds for planting next week.

This Saturday we hosted our workshop at the Lydia Hawk garden, the turn out was a lot less than expected but we were still able to get a nice chunk of work done leveling out a section of the garden and planting some starts that we donated to us by a local high school. Right now I feel that the garden is experiencing a bit of a backlog in work from the pandemic and will continue to need some TLC.

This week at St. Marks,  we spent entirely on finishing up our field trip program for the year. We ended with third and fourth graders. After working with the third graders I was extremely taken aback to notice the developmental difference just one year has on kids from second to third grade. I really value this experience of working up the grade levels and developmental stages. It has been extremely rewarding to ‘up the stakes”’ with each grade and slowly gets more into the ecology world as the students’ ages increase.  I thought I would briefly describe some of the key points we focus on during the field trips:

-Michaelas Intro:

Michaela usually starts us off by gathering the class in a semi-circle around the St Marks Community Garden Sign and we read the sign out loud together. Michaela then asks the class what the word ‘community’ means to them. Students raise their hands and share their knowledge of the word, stating things like a community is a place where people live, a neighborhood or city, or even sometimes the whole Earth. Michaela then shares that their class is a community where they take care of and support each other. She then explains that we live in a kind and caring community where we take care of each other and shares that she works with the Food Bank and that the garden we are at grows 13,000 pounds of food to donate to the food bank to help feed our community, as no one in our community should go without food. The students then learn that they get to help plant the garden to care for their community, this is followed by cheering and excitement. We are providing an opportunity for the students to be active members of the community and foster a sense of empowerment that they are valued and have the power to affect the world around them. 

The talk then moves to describe the community boxes. It is explained that people in the area that live in an apartment or don’t have a yard are able to reserve a garden box to grow in and the church provides water and supplies and a space that doesn’t cost any money. Michaela asks the students if they would travel into a neighbor’s house and open their fridge and start eating their food. This is followed by laughter and cries of ‘of course not’ and shock at the proposition. She explains that people’s garden boxes are kind of like their personal refrigerators and that when walking into a community garden we shouldn’t start eating people’s garden bounty without permission. The guidelines for how to behave in the garden, and that it should be treated as an outdoor classroom and not like recess, are established and the group splits into two groups. Half the group goes with the church farmers to plant and the other half goes with me and other interns to go on a garden tour of the community

boxes. 

Rhubarb:

We use rhubarb as a lesson in plant parts and safety in consuming plants and the importance of identification and permission to eat plants we are unfamiliar with. We look at the massive green leaf and the long red stem and explain that we only eat the stem of rhubarb as the leaves will make us sick or give us a tummy ache. We talk about other plant parts we eat i.e roots-carrots, potatoes, leaves-lettuce, kale, spinach, stems-celery, rhubarb. We talk about how it is really important to ask and identify plants before we eat them as the enticing rhubarb leaves that resemble kale or lettuce are deceiving and can upset our stomachs. 

Rhubarb patch by El Knowles

Strawberries: 

We observe the flowers growing on the strawberry plants and notice the small green strawberry starting to form at different developmental stages in different plants. We talk about how fruit comes from flowers and about what a plant needs to grow i.e.soil, sunlight, and air. 

Apple Tree:

We identify the type of tree and confirm it is an apple tree. We observe the reproductive parts of the flower (the pistils and stamens), and we talk about pollination and about how every flower has the potential to turn into an apple. We smell the blossoms and take in their beauty. We talk about how long it will take for the apple to form and be ready to be eaten, typical guesses range from five minutes to five years and we explain that they will be ready to be eaten in the fall time when they return to school in the next grade level. We talk about how much time and energy that tree puts into creating each apple to plant the seed of putting food waste into perspective. With the older grades, I started to introduce the concept of thinning and pruning to increase apple yield/size. We identify the “king flower” in the center and observe all of the other flowers that surround it and imagine how much space each apple would take up if they all grew together on that clump. 

Mint:

 I really like to use mint as a tool to introduce sustainable harvesting practices. I mime ripping up an entire fistful of mint and ask if this the way to harvest a plant, it is quickly followed with cries of no and we talk about how doing that could hurt the plant, it could disrupt its growing cycle, and how it also takes away the opportunity to try a mint leaf from the rest of the school community. I point out the distinguishable square stem of the mint plant and show how to carefully pinch off one leaf to smell and taste. We talk about what the smell and taste remind us of and I like to make sure we give our thanks to the plant for allowing us to sample some of it.

Peas:

Michaela introduced the practice of identifying different microgreens and plant starts by taste. We sample a pea leaf using the same harvesting techniques we learned with the mint and taste how the leaf mimics the flavor of the pea itself. We observe the trellis present and notice how the peas use their tendrils to climb upwards to get more sunlight.

Snack and wrap up:

After both groups complete each task we then move into the church rec room where the snack team has prepared us a snack consisting of fruits and veggies including a sample of what each age group got to plant that day, broccoli, cabbage, beans, as well as strawberry and mint infused water. After discussing the flavors and experience of eating the snack and about our experiences growing food at home we wrap up with a class picture and sometimes a mindfulness activity with Michaela outside under a beautiful tree.

This week second graders joined us on their field trips in the St Mark Gardens and they helped to plant the broccoli patch. Our team started out the morning with a warning from one of the teachers that their class had many ‘problem kids’ or ‘bad kids’. We braced ourselves but as we moved through the field trip it was extremely clear that none of the kids were ‘problems’. I kept looking to find who the kids were that needed extra care but only saw a lively and engaged class of second graders who were overjoyed to be in the garden and learning outside. The whole experience made me think a lot about the PBIS, or Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, the definition being: 

Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is a set of ideas and tools that schools use to improve the behavior of students. PBIS uses evidence and data-based programs, practices, and strategies to frame behavioral improvement in terms of student growth in academic performance, safety, behavior, and establishing and maintaining positive school culture. PBIS addresses the needs of at-risk students as well as the multi-leveled needs of all students in regards to behavior, which creates an environment for both teachings and learning to occur in schools. The approach is believed by researchers such as Robert H. Horner to enhance the school staff’s time for delivering effective instructions and lessons to all students.^[1]

Basically, PBIS is a reframing of how educators and those in the public school system view ‘problem’ kids or kids that need extra care. The general idea guiding it is that if you label a kid as ‘bad’ in their learning environment and perpetuate the stigma around them it will only exacerbate the situation and that label will follow the student throughout the rest of their lives. PBIS offers a different approach to treating these problem kids and offers positive reinforcement for positive choices and behaviors.

I see the value in PBIS and support the impact it has had on public education. My heart still goes out to the children who don’t fit into the molds that seem to be required in order to succeed in public education. I think that as a whole the system has been failing for years and has failed many many students. I personally feel that I was failed by the public education system in ways that still follow me to this day. I want to make clear that I do not believe that individual teachers or principals or counselors are the ones who are at fault. I believe that there has been an extreme disconnect between the mission to serve and support our youth in learning and growing and the actual resources and money and intent that go into public education. Standardized testing and moving from a place of numbering children’s worth has set the system up to only serve those who fit into the boxes.

This week at Lydia Hawk I started to create a faerie village in our garden. I started out with the younger kinder and introduced how to construct a mound and decorate it with sticks and rocks and things living on the garden ground. I explained to them that by building the faeries houses we were inviting them into the garden to help care for the plants. I grew up playing with fairies and communing with the spirits of nature and have always made sure to introduce the concept of fairies to any group of students I am working with. To me, I view ‘working the faeries’ as a way to connect to nature and the magic that is in the natural world in a playful and silly way that allows imagination and creativity and breaks down the walls of the structured world. Every kid believes in fairies at some level and every kid has a wild imaginative and powerful mind that is capable of connecting to the magic and power of nature. It felt really sweet to start a faerie village in a public school garden. I have spent two summers working at an outdoor survival camp with the four and five-year-olds specifically in faerie camp. I led nature excursions in the woods and we worked with fairies and gnomes and elves and all of the magical mythical creatures that nourish childhood. It felt really sweet to be able to take some of that somewhat exclusive and inaccessible day camp world for more financially privileged children and bring it to public school students in their day-to-day world. 

It was interesting to see how the older kids reacted to the faerie village and how it took them a little more time to accept and fall into play. It feels really important and powerful for me to be able to be that adult to encourage them to hold onto their childhood selves in a world that is pressuring them to grow up so rapidly. We also had mud contests to see who could get their hands the muddiest before it was time to clean up and go back to class. I really enjoy facilitating free play and think it is extremely important in Outdoor Education to loosen the ropes and allow the students to guide their own learning and exploration. The demand for garden recess is increasing and the students seem overjoyed to be able to spend time in the garden.

This week I spent Tuesday opening up the garden at Lydia Hawk for my very first garden recess, and I believe the first garden recess for the students since before the pandemic. Michaela had a meeting to attend so she gave me a brief rundown of what the recess looks like. She explained that I was the first person she let jump in blind, without a day of modeling done by her. I was eager to start and have time to spend with kiddos in the garden with a free structure as opposed to the field trip lesson plans. Michaela helped me get the recess schedule and introduced me to the recess teachers and we handed them four seed packets to serve as ‘recess tickets’ to hand out to kiddos as a pass to come hang out in the garden. The plan was originally to start off with four students in the garden at a time but as more and more came over to see what was happening excited to see someone in the garden, I upped the tickets to six and let more students in at a time. 

This week morels popped up in the garden beds, we believe due to the heat waves of this past summer. My first lesson plan for the recess involved exploring what was growing in the beds including the morels. I gave a brief background on mushroom harvesting and the importance of identifying and cooking mushrooms. We began to collect data to see if more would pop up and I had students go around and count all of the mushrooms they could and record the number they found. We also planted seeds and sampled different plants in the garden.I had an absolute blast during the whole day it was incredible to see the joy the students got from being outside and learning.

Towards the end of the day, I noticed that there was a student hanging around out of bounds of the school. I tried to engage the student into joining me in the garden but needed to get a recess teacher out to help. The recess teacher informed me that the student had been missing in the neighborhood and the police had been looking for them since 8 am. I heard that the number of ‘runaways’ in schools has increased dramatically. I view it as an act of rebellion against the current system that they are in. The public schools are failing children and the behavior incidents are increasing. Once I informed a recess teacher an office aide came out to stand with the runaway student, and they both stood to the side and I noticed the student observing what we were working on in the garden. 

The day ended and everyone ran back into their classrooms to get ready to go home. I was cleaning up and I noticed that the student was still off to the side, unresponsive and not moving into the school to go home. I went up to them with a packet of chard seeds and asked if they could help me plant them, they nodded their heads, ‘yes’ and we went to one of the garden beds. I demonstrated how to dig a hole in the soil and cover it up and I noticed that as soon as they got their hands in the soil their entire being calmed down;  it was like a deep breath of fresh air and they started to open up and talk to me. They were extremely polite and made sure that we were both doing things equally and that I had just as many seeds as they did. When we planted our seeds, I asked if they wanted to help water them, they said yes and followed me to the rain barrel.  I demonstrated how to turn on and off the tap and how to not overflood the seeds. After watering the seeds we planted, we proceeded to water the other plants in the garden. The student completely opened up and felt a huge sense of accomplishment in caring for the garden. It was beautiful to watch their mood transform and see them fall in love with the garden. After we were done watering, I asked the aide with us what needed to happen next with the student and they shared that the student needed to get back into the classroom to grab their things so they could go home for the day, but was struggling to make the journey back. I got an idea and asked the student if they would be willing to help me carry some boxes of ‘garden supplies’ back into the office and they happily agreed and together the three of us entered back into the school. I thanked them for being such a big help in the garden and offered them to come back to visit me whenever they wanted. I offered them a packet of sunflower seeds as a thank you present. I have an affinity for planting sunflowers with the students as an act of solidarity for Ukraine. They accepted the seeds graciously and were able to get back into their classroom and go home for the day. 

The next day, I ran into my garden friend trying to leave the school grounds again. I  asked them to come to help our team in the garden and they gladly accepted the invitation. They shared with me that they planted the sunflower seeds in their front yard as soon as they got home the day before. Overall the experience really transformed and solidified my understanding of the impact that school gardens have on kids and the healing capacity of working in a garden has on humans. This is an experience that I will carry with me for the continuation of my career in Environmental Education.

This week at St. Marks,  we had first graders join us for their field trips and they planted squash starts. I felt myself get back into my teaching groove during these field trips and was really reminded of the immense joy I have sharing nature with my students and being able to see through their eyes. I believe children to be innately connected with the natural world and have a deep understanding of how the world works at a level outside of adult science and logic. I learn so much from my students. It is my life mission to foster and nourish that child-like wonder and wisdom that we all possess in our early days. I hope to be someone to inspire children to hold on to that magic that the modern technological world stomps out of the connection to the natural world. I truly believe that Environmental Education and fostering deep meaningful relationships with the natural world early on in children’s lives will build generations that will care for the Earth and each other in a way that is lacking in our current society. If we let children play in the dirt and see the beauty of nourishing a seed to harvest, if we allow them to run wild and free in natural spaces and allow them to wholly themselves in nature we will foster adults who will care for the Environment.

So far this quarter I have had the opportunity to teach garden lessons to all ages of elementary students from kindergarten to fifth grade in the garden recess program at Lydia Hawk as well as kindergarten to second grade during field trip lessons at Mountain View Elementary. It has been extremely valuable to get to practice my teaching skills with various age groups and learn how to adjust my use of language and energy levels to best suit my age audiences. I have been able to learn how to teach garden lessons in a formal field trip setting as well as a less formal recess setting, both have been helpful in learning the impact and interworking of how to use a garden for a learning space as well as a tool to develop social and emotional skills. I have also learned a lot about how the Food Bank operates and how a garden education program is funded and supported via a nonprofit and have learned of several other pathways to start a garden program My goals for the rest of the quarter are to complete official lesson plans and activities as well as continue to develop my teaching skills and confidence. I would also like to complete more research on garden learning and social-emotional learning.

This week we started off our field trips at Mountain View Elementary! We kicked off the field trips with the four Kindergarten classes spread out between Wednesday and Thursday. Before diving into the report of how the trips went I want to give some history of this program.

Michaela Winkley, my sponsor at the Food Bank, started this program around 2013 when she received a grant to teach nutrition education to elementary students at Mountain View. When she discovered that the job largely consisted of the typical ‘big dairy’ funded nutrition education that was dominant in the school system at the time, she began to think outside of the box about how to meet the requirements of the grant but still provide a valuable learning experience for the students. Michaela discovered that across the street at the St. Mark Lutheran Church a garden was hiding behind the building. The St. Mark garden has been established for over ten years and has done so much to help assist their community. There is a strong network of church members who have been working in the garden and working with Michaela leading the field trip program.

The garden is split into two sections, a community garden that consists of raised beds that church members and community neighbors grow in as well as a large farm-style plot that is dedicated to growing food to donate back to the community via the food bank. The church over the years has produced over 10,000 lbs of food for the community and is producing about 13,000 pounds a year. The students get to help plant in the food bank garden during the field trips which is a pretty special thing for them, they get to help plant food that will feed their communities. The church also has a 100% free laundry mat on its grounds to help assist the families of Mountain View.

After discovering the garden Michaela partnered with the gardening team at St. Mark and the field trip program was born. The students walk across the street and have an hour-long field trip with our team. Half of the class helps to plant with the church team in the food bank garden and the other half goes on a garden tour with Michaela and I where we discuss what’s growing in the garden and talk about basic garden ecology. I think we will have more planned activities for the older age groups, but with the younger age groups just getting time to explore and play in the garden is really impactful. The Church then provides a snack related to what is happening in the garden. This week we planted the pumpkin patch with the Kindergartens so pumpkin seeds were included in the snack menu. Mountain View is located in a low-income community and it’s pretty huge to be able to have an accessible outdoor education program available. It is really sweet to see the classes walking across the street to come to explore the garden.

The young grade levels, preschool, and kindergarten have always had my heart. There is something so magical about guiding that age group on adventures outside and getting to experience nature through their eyes. I feel really passionately about the importance of outdoor early childhood development and see myself working with them in the future. I have not worked with kids since before the pandemic so my teaching ‘muscles’ felt pretty rusty and I know it will take some time before I feel fully confident again. Michaela and I solidified my focus for the quarter and she connected me with the Preschool and Kindergarten leads at Mountain View I will have the opportunity to volunteer in their classrooms and gain more experience. I will start this next week as well as start our garden recess program back at Lydia Hawk where I will be facilitating garden time during the student’s recess periods.

This week I also spent time working at the Food Bank’s warehouse helping to organize and sort through seeds saved in the past. I also did a little work in the prairie garden but ultimately decided I want to focus on early childhood education. We have grant money for Lydia Hawk that needs to be spent by June so I will be helping Michaela put together material lists and organize the things that need to be done. I am also hoping to learn more about how the grant writing procedure works from Michaela.

On Saturday I attended a garden work party, which is a monthly occurrence around the community where a school garden workshop and tour is given and then work time is held. This one took place at East Olympia Elementary, a school garden that has been neglected over the years and is no longer in use. We helped to remove garden beds to create space for a parent volunteer to later level out the ground and hopefully revive the garden. I have been able to meet several other people involved in school gardens in the area as well as an Everggen CCBLA volunteer coordinator who helps connect evergreen students interested in education to internships like mine. It was really interesting to hear about other garden programs and I feel like I am just cracking open into this world. there is so much to see and learn and it feels really special to have someone like Michaela be there to help me navigate it.