Teaching in the Garden

I have so many ideas for how to teach in the garden. And not just lessons about digging weeds and filling the bird feeders :). Virtually every subject has roots (he he) in the garden. Reading/Writing/Spelling, we can read gardening books and learn vocabulary words, write our own short stories and daydream the day away. Math~ we can count types of flowers, find patterns in nature and in our plantings, learn to identify nature things, make maps and a wide variety of graphs. Science, well everything happening outside in the garden is science. Health can be covered by discussing the physical aspect of outdoor labor and learn about the healthy vegetables and fruits we can grow. Occupation Education, hmmm… well, we can be farmers or learn about manual labor. If we identify our plants and insects by their Latin name we’ve got a foreign language covered. We can discuss different types of crops and where they grow, and what the people are like that grow them ~ Social Studies! Appreciation of music is a little bit more difficult, we could sing while we work, although whistling would be more appropriate! We can take a radio out and listen to music, that’ll work. For history, we can talk about hunting and gathering and the changes made through time to growing crops. Look at that, in just 5 minutes I was able to think of how to cover all necessary 11 subjects while working in the garden!