Raised Bed

"My students had been reading about Native Americans and noticed the many references to corn and its range of uses," reports Cambridge, MA, third and fourth grade teacher Marianne Moll. "This inspired a series of questions about corn: Where did it come from? How did it grow? How was it used? So I drew on the students' curiosity, helping them to organize their questions and encouraging collaborative investigations."

Kindergarten classes at Carmel (IN) Elementary School cultivate flowers in Alaska, while fifth graders tend cotton and peanuts in the Deep South. They're not national travelers but participants in an ambitious "Courtyard U.S.A." garden project. Faced with the specter of expensive landscaping for a renovated school courtyard, teachers and PTO members brainstormed a more educational use of the courtyard.

An outdoor garden that began with an offer of help from a landscape architect parent turned into much more for a group of second graders in Athens, GA.

"We try to bring our study of colonial America to life by engaging students in actually 'experiencing' those times," reports fifth grade teacher Arna Caplan of Golden, CO.

"Our third and fourth grade team is studying the history of this region and the immigrants who settled it," reports Kathy Farrington from South Burlington, VT. With an eye toward making the investigation more meaningful for her pupils, Kathy asked them to interview parents, grandparents, and other elders to find out where they had emigrated from and what types of items they had valued enough to bring with them.

"A committee of teachers in our middle school had set a goal of meeting curriculum standards and bringing life and depth to our world geography studies," reports Gaston, SC, geography teacher Angie Rye.

"My tenth graders had paired up with elementary students to fill a butterfly nectar garden with butterfly bush, black-eyed Susans, and so on, then realized the need for larval host plants," reports Collegeville, PA, teacher Sandy Sweeney.

Students knew from researching the monarch that the caterpillars needed milkweed, so they decided to collect its seeds and try to raise seedlings in the GrowLab to transplant to the garden.

"When my ninth graders decided to increase the diversity of life on our school site, they were particularly interested in attracting birds, since we were participating in Cornell's Project FeederWatch," reports Hyrum, UT, teacher Ron Helstern.