Entrance Slip 9/18

While reading the article, I stopped at the idea of the garden and living ecosystems as co-teacher. To be honest, I haven’t really thought much about teaching outside a classroom before. Despite not explaining things out loud, the living ecosystem still “teaches, inspires and speaks” (p.109). We are “observers at all times, learning from the garden itself” (p.110). This really clicked for me when I thought back to our class the other day during the sit spot drawing activity. During our discussions I noticed the birds chirping, ants crawling, and bees moving from flower to flower. None of those things were “teaching” in the traditional sense, but they made me more aware, more curious, and more attentive.

If I were to teach science in a high school garden, the first activity that comes to mind would involve microscopes and drawing (Science 8), inspired by our sit-spot drawing exercise. Students would create detailed scientific sketches of a specimen of their choice—potentially producing one drawing without a microscope and another using the microscope to capture finer details. This activity allows students to practice observation and data recording in a hands-on way, similar to what they would experience in an indoor lab, but with the added immediacy and vitality of working directly with living samples from the garden. One challenge might be that multiple students choose the same specimen, reducing the variety of observations though a possible solution could be to provide magnifying lenses of different scales, encouraging students to explore and represent the same object from multiple perspectives.

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