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.
