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When roles are switched and students become teachers, it can be a growing experience for everyone. Jim Micarelli, Science Department Head at Everett High School in Everett, MA, wrote to describe an innovative GrowLab workshop for elementary teachers which incorporated an unusual group of presenters -- their former students turned high school seniors.

Students come to the classroom with ideas about their world, shaped by everyday experience, language, and imaginations that fill in the gaps. Do your students believe that plants suck up food from the soil? Or that trees are not really plants?

Boston first-grade teacher Karen Gallas reports that one student brought in a toy motorcycle, expecting it to grow if planted. Meg Richardson, a teacher liaison for a plant-based curriculum in New York, shared that during a unit on plant parts, students unanimously stated that all roots are brown.

The budding entrepreneurs in Carolyn West's special education class in New York City chose "The Green Team" as the name for their interior plant business. Using their newly acquired knowledge about caring for growing things, these seventh and ninth graders raise houseplants from cuttings in their GrowLab, then advertise and rent plants to individual teachers and administrative offices, maintaining each plant for 50 cents a week.

Michael Zahm's fourth graders in Carmel, IN, gathered lots of "dirt" this year -- quite literally -- as a way of linking geography and earth science studies with indoor gardening. Letters went out early in the year to parents, teachers, and other students asking them to bring back samples of soils from their travels and vacations. By February, a remarkable 55 soil samples from 20 different states had been returned to the kids, who then plotted each sample on a map.

"Is a great day of growing to my plant," writes Manuael Maya, a Peruvian student in Lee Gough's English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) language training program in Arlington, VA. Lee, science resource specialist for the ESOL program, looks for appealing, high-interest, concrete contexts for teaching English language skills and building confidence in non-native speakers. "Plants and gardens truly engage and involve kids," says Lee. "Many of our students have emigrated from rural farming communities and have a lot to offer to our explorations of plants and gardens."

"After I attended a nutrition and gardening workshop, I was tempted to enrich our school garden project by challenging each student to conduct in-depth research on a particular food crop for one month in the spring," reports Aiken, SC, teacher Belinda Yonce. "When I revealed to my fifth graders that I wasn't sure they could handle the challenge, my hesitancy was all the motivation they needed!" The class gathered a variety of vegetable seed packets, then each student chose a crop to explore.

"Each year my fourth and fifth graders brainstorm a variety of plant foods, then choose one type as a focus for in-depth investigations," reports Brighton, MA, teacher Rita Holder. "This year, citrus fruits inspired their curiosity." The unit began with students exploring a medley of citrus fruits - orange, tangerine, grapefruit, citron, lemon, ugli fruit - and several citrus fruit plants donated by a local plant shop. Students' initial observations and comparisons yielded a range of questions and ideas about what citrus fruits have in common, Rita reports.

"Our sixth grade curriculum required us to cover concepts dealing with growth needs, adaptations, and ecosystems," reports Pocatello, ID, teacher Mary McAleese. "So we decided to bring in some live plants to explore up close." Since the classroom was short on light, Mary solicited donations from local plant businesses of tropical plants adapted to low-light conditions on rainforest floors. Before long, the students transformed the classroom into a 40-square-foot rainforest -- a centerpiece for plant and environmental studies, complete with a floor-to-ceiling canvas backdrop.