Edutopia

The edible schoolyard was a really good idea. The program i viewed was at Martin Luther King Junior Middle School as part of their integrated studies. The program came about with a teacher growing her own garden behind the school with the help of students to improve the lunch at the school. The way the class works is the students in the class get to plant their own garden or together grow a garden of their own. They have to do research about what they are growing, maintain their vegetables, fruit, or flowers and make sure they grow. When i was in high school we had a program like this called Agriscience, but it wasn't as extensive as this program. No one ate the food or did much with it, we just helped maintain it every so often in my class.

The edible garden is a very good way to teach because some people are better at books and some people are better with their hands so it gives each student a chance to excel at school. It is an interactive way to learn about science, agriculture, and life. The students learn about ecology, photosynthesis, the water cycle, and many other things that explain the life of plants. Also, this class teaches the students responsibility, how to take pride in their work, and may give some students who don't excel in the classroom a way to excel and feel good about themselves. The edible garden is a wonderful idea for teachers because it gets everyone involved in some way whether its books or hands on. If someone is good at books they can research how to care for the plant. If someone is good with their hands and more manual labor than they can actually plant the plants or do the digging and they actual maintenance.

A night in the Global Village at Heifer Ranch was a pretty scary concept to me. This was a social and emotional kind of learning. They took the students out to a secluded camp and split them up by tribes and each tribe got a different necessity like one got wood, one got food, one got water, and one got nothing and they had to trade and live like people really do in impoverished areas in the world. The ranch also donates livestock to the impoverished.

The night in the globe village over at the Heifer Ranch was a really great way to learn about how the poor really lives. People don't believe how bad the conditions are in third world countries and this shows the students with first hand experience. The students learn about poverty and makes the students survive on their own. As a teacher this would be a good way to teach because it makes the students work together, gets them interested, and is a new style of learning where when students get involved they learn more. This would be an exciting thing as a teacher to get your students involved in and a good learning tool.