While I had a rough start to my day yesterday, there was a bright spot other than my chance to develop relationships with a new set of students. I also had a new group of young adult volunteers come to the garden to help in the afternoon. These were all people who work for a…
Last Wednesday, I spent 8 hours ruminating over whether I wanted to support an outside, non-profit gardening group get involved in “assisting” my efforts at the school where I currently work as Garden Club Advisor. Eight hours. It was too much. A proposal was brought forward to the principal and PTO about bringing in this…
For the last two weeks, I’ve been making regular trips to the school gardens I now manage. They are vast and I am not yet done cleaning up the plants, now dead, left to serve as winter interest and perhaps some sources of food for the birds. I am about two thirds of the way…
Today’s blog post will be brief. Primarily this is due to digging around in my stacks of papers, handouts, and folders for visual aids I need to help me make a presentation tomorrow morning. The presentation will be to an entire staff of elementary school teachers, none of whom know me very well. A few…
Yesterday, three nice things happened to me while I was at the school where I am the “new” garden club advisor. I went over to continue my spring clean up which commenced last week before the first of two snow storms. Three consecutive Thursdays were scheduled to work in the garden, but this week had…
Yesterday, I led my new group of garden club students through a lesson in which they had to videotape me. One of my graduate courses is requiring that I be recorded while conducting a micro lesson on place as part of an assignment. The course is Place Based Education – Strategies for Teaching. For the…
In October, I accepted a position as a Garden Club Advisor for an internationally themed elementary school in our area. It is a well-known, well-respected school of choice, locally. I do not want to say I was a shoe-in for the position, but I interviewed offering 13 years of experience of leading a garden club…
Today, I offer a Slice of Life Tuesday post that is two-pronged. In one prong, I ask for you to share your experience with me for a future post. The second prong entails telling what I did yesterday – an old activity, in a new place! Prong One: Currently, I am working a post about Advanced…
I spent this morning at a neighboring school district, about twenty minutes away by car. Sixty first graders, in three separate classes, sat quietly and listened to my presentation on the Monarch Life Cycle, the importance of milkweed, Monarch Migration and the development of the Monarch Highway. With the exception of the information on the…