m13-leakurpasova-blog

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HERE WE COME!

We were looking forward for the moment to bring the children to the garden and see how it goes. This time, the activity was offered to 1st-3rd graders and approximately 10 of them were happy to join with idea of planting “their” veggies. We made agreements with their teacher and she divided them. They came in the group of 5 at the time.

This was really the time when I learnt the most so far >>> Finding a balance between guidance and free choice, prioritising children’s learning and experience before getting things done or having everything in place, keeping children occupied, cooperating with Lea in the meantime and so on. It is very hard to be perfectionist when you are out there with children. Children can be all around the place and you really need to focus and know where you are heading towards. I observed that children loose interest very fast when they don’t find it exciting enough, they need to see the purpose (especially in a free school like this one, where children are use to making a lot of choices by themselves).

I noticed 3 major things that helped increasing their motivation for working in the garden:

1. Having a choice and making their own decisions. We met with more positive reactions when children had a possibility to choose the task they prefer themselves e.g. they could choose if they wanted to plant a hokkaido pumpkin or a pepper, if they wanted to tidy up shovels or neat the soil around planted vegetables. Instead of a plain commanding them or distributing task according to us.

2. Working with a friend. Having a chance to do something together with their friend like carrying a bag of soil, planting seeds in a flower bed (2 pupils per one flower bed) and so on turned out the ignite more willingness.

3. Feeling of ownership. Carrying a task by themselves, feeling proud, saying: “This is the whole which I dug!”, “I planted this squash”. Example of this effect > One boy was supposed to water freshly planted seeds of yellow beans. Several areas were planted, each by different child. He obviously poured extra water on the beans that were planted by him, ha-ha! (Just a side note - his beans were first out of the soil.)

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Pauli sums up our post-school trip activities. As you can read here in her post, we skipped involving children in preparing conditions for the school garden. We took it into our own hands (—>the shovels) and digged our way to success! 

PREPARATION OF THE GARDEN. After we returned back from the school trip we thought we must give the school garden project another chance…Decision has come and we took ourselves over to the garden space and worked hard on preparing the unbelievably hard and poor soil. The conditions were not ideal but we did not have so many options nor time. Eventually, I had a lot of fun in the process planning and creating conditions suitable for growing together with Lea. Digging, shovelling, shopping for plants and seeds (that might still be planted in the late summer). The plan was to prepare the garden for some action…planting together with children! The type of action that might spark their interest, finally…(hopefully) :-D

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Inspiration

Pauli and I visited a local community garden here in Banská Bystrica. Just to get some inspiration for the future school garden composition and design... :-)

Lavender labyrinth (in the growing;)), herbal spiral, wooden sitting area made of pallets, swings for children, tool shed...

It seems to be a popular place for families to socialize, for children to play and for everyone to enjoy a little bit of nature in the middle of the city...

We liked all the flowers that were planted in between the salad, veggies and herbs - made the garden look fresh and colourful!

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School Trip

We spent one whole week together with children and teachers in the middle of Slovak nature. This environment provided a lot of opportunities to get to know each other better through different outdoor activities like hiking, picking flowers and herbs, playing games, sitting around a bonfire in the evenings, sleeping in tents... Every morning, there was space for every adult to offer some activity. Pauli and I did acroyoga (acrobatic yoga in pairs) workshops, which seemed to be quite popular among the kids :-)

This trip was a wonderful experience; we connected with children and teachers in a very nice way and were able to fit in to the school environment much better afterwards.

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Reflections

Here are my thoughts on why we did not get any children signed up for the school garden project:

1. We probably did not introduce the project in an exciting-enough way. We wanted to engage the children in the whole process of creating a school garden, and that’s also what we told them. We wanted to start with looking for a suitable location, detecting the condition of the soil (collaborating with the biology teacher), finding out which plants can be planted at this point of the season, and then planting, caring for the garden, and finally harvesting the produce and cooking. I can imagine that this may sound overwhelming... and I guess not everyone gets excited about detecting the soil condition as much as I do. I get it. Maybe we should have only talk about the planting, harvesting and cooking.

2. Wrong age group? We introduced this project to 4th-6th grade, so 10-12 year-old kids. Many children are starting to be a little rebellious at this age, as they are almost teenagers. So especially for these guys, I guess the activities we mentioned were really not appealing.

3. They did not know us. Another barrier could have been that Pauli and I were newcomers. We hadn’t had much interaction with these children before we introduced the project to them. Maybe they weren’t sure what to expect from us, they might not trusted us enough yet.

... so we will need to take into consideration all these things next time we introduce the project to the kids!

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More cooking

This time the menu consisted of a vegetarian risotto and cabbage salad. We also made a fresh drink from eldeflower and berries.

Boys chopping up carrots, celery and pastinak

Excited chefs!

Finally enjoying the meal

Making eldeflower syrup

Cheers!

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Week 1: Getting started (or not!)

The first week of my internship was very exciting... and also a game-changer!

As I already mentioned, my internship place is an alternative school. One of the main aspects of the way of teaching here is freedom of choice. Children here are offered subjects or projects, and they can pick what they want to learn or work on (or they have to come up with something themselves), but they are very rarely told to do something specific. I didn’t quite realize that things were so very much up to the children here and that this could create some problems for our project... But it kind of did - at least in the beginning. In the time of the start of our internship, the children were supposed to find a topic for a project, which they would be working on for the following 3 weeks. We introduced the project “School Garden” to the children in 4th - 6th grade (10-12 years old) in one of the first days of the internship, and were surprised by their lack of interest... No one signed up :-(

Now, that was a bummer (haha!). What to do ???

After initial stage of hopelessness, we decided we would try to find at least some activity related to nutrition and health, until we work out a plan B for our school garden dream.

So we offered another possible project for the children to choose: healthy cooking! The idea was to cook their favourite meals in a “healthier” way... And here we got 5 sweet candidates. :-)

The first meal we made was a vegetable soup with noodles (which they normally buy in powder)... :-) It was a lovely experience. The kids were excited, all of them wanted to contribute and they collaborated very well.

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My internship buddy

I haven’t mentioned yet, that I will be sharing this internship with my friend (and classmate) Paulína... :-) Yabadooo!

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My learning objectives

The main content of my internship is setting up a school garden, and so my biggest learning objective is connected to this project. However, I also got the chance to be an assistant teacher (yays!) and therefore, I would also like to expand my knowledge and skills in teaching. So here are my learning objectives and related strategies to achieve them:

Learning Objective 1: To be able to coordinate the process of setting up a school garden.

Key strategies (tasks):

Investigation of the school grounds to find the most suitable spot

Planning and designing the garden together with the children

Exploring possibilities of obtaining tools and materials, addressing parents who are willing to join or contribute

Manually setting up the garden together with children and teachers

Learning Objecive 2: To gain skills in teaching and communication with children, to facilitate the learning process.

Key strategies (tasks):

Conducting classes and workshops with children

Learning Objective 3: To be able to design classes based on suitable learning theories in order to reach best possible learning outcomes of the children.

Key strategies (tasks): Designing and planning the aforementioned classes and workshops according to specific learning theories, such as experiential learning, community learning, etc. The classes will be focusing on some of the following:

Learning about different types of vegetables and their needs

Natural fertilizers

Nutritional content of different vegetables and human nutritional needs

Herbs and different ways of using them

Environment and sustainability

Cooking classes

Learning Objective 4: To gain greater skills in performing qualitative research and processing the collected data.

Key strategies (tasks): Facilitating focus groups, doing interviews with the children and teachers, transcribing, coding and interpreting the findings in the BA thesis.

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About my internship place

So my internship is taking place at a private elementary school called Dve Ruky (”Two Hands“) in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia. It is an alternative school, which means that the approach to teaching is a bit more free, compared with conventional public schools. The curriculum offers a wide spectrum of subjects, with emphasis on crafts, games, arts, outdoor education and a lot of motion. It is a small school with approximately 30 pupils and 10 teachers, which creates a cozy, family-like environment.

I fell in love with this school when I first visited it during my previous internship, and so I decided to contact them to see if they would be interested in setting up a school garden - and they were! :-D

Beliefs of school Dve Ruky “We all learn. Children, teachers and parents. Every day. But not always from books and in the classroom. In our small school we create a safe environment, where children and teachers can come everyday and connect with themseves. Then they start to create, work and play. In this way, they discover the world, people and the material to be learned. Through communication we create a place, where they can feel safe. In our school we take seriously the fact, that children are emotionally mature – they can sense, what is good for them. They can solve their problems, communicate and find a solution, eventhough it is different from what we, adults expect. Children in our school can learn individually. They learn in school, there is no need for grades and homework. They read books and write essays. They do arts and crafts, cook, work with hands. Our children have plenty of movement, play and we like it.”

Source: http://www.skoladveruky.sk/myslienka-skoly/

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Welcome!

My name is Lea and I am a student of Global Nutrition and Health, specializing in Lifestyle & Health Education at Metropolitan University College in Copenhagen, Denmark. I am now in my last year of this bachelor’s degree programme and in this blog I will be writing about my internship at an elementary school in my home country, Slovakia. The main content of my work here will be setting up a school garden together with the children and teachers. The idea of school gardens has been introduced to us several times at the university, since engaging in gardening, especially at a young age, has shown to have multiple health-related benefits: increased vegetable consumption, promoting food literacy and sustainable living, increased physical activity levels, and many more. A school garden can also serve as an outdoor classroom, suitable for teaching for instance biology, geology and other natural sciences. I am fascinated with the idea of school gardens, because I see great importance in giving children the opportunity to be present in nature, to play, learn and get hands-on experience... And so I am very happy that I got the chance to try to establish one :-))