Thursday, March 12, 2009

Unschooling Garden



Ahhhhh...the joys of Unschooling! The whole no workbooks, worksheets, planned lessons is just working so incredibly for us. Our project we started last week at Tornado Boy's request was to grow a container garden. We are "garden bug" members at a local Garden center and they send us monthly emails about new things going on at their center. In the last message, they sent pictures of a container vegetable garden and how to make one. Our little guy was so interested that we took some scrap wood from the garage, made our container and then painted it a fun purple color to match some purple chairs we already have outside in our Zen Garden we made last year. He picked out all the veggies and some herbs to plant. He was determined to have the same number of herbs as veggies and was very careful in what he picked. We have all sorts of stuff like peppermint (which is his favorite), rosemary, peppers, tomatoes, squash, celery, sage....among several others.
During the whole process we have used math to map out and measure the container garden so that we could grid off each section properly. We used reading to research the different veggies and which kind worked best in the Florida climate. We used science when researching about the best kind of soil and why it was the best. Of course, art with the painting. I am sure we hit on a ton of other subjects as well. We also made a special hanging container and planted strawberries. He has been enjoying watching all the plants already growing! The squash plants are already huge and soon we will need to place up the growing trellis for some of the others. We love unschooling.....when would he have had the chance to do this in a classroom other than the typical bean plant grown in a cup that all kindergarten kids seem to do each year?!
Thank you mother nature for everything you teach us each day!

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