SPEAKER: We just finished a project-based cross curricular unit. First, my students read about square foot gardening in blogs, books, and articles. But I have a student who's working on plant life cycles, so he read about that using an adapted book and an object communication device.
Then my students used what they learned and the data gathered on preferences of vegetables that we gathered in our class, and we planned out our school garden during a class discussion and created diagrams to represent what was going to be planted. Some students wrote, but this student cut and pasted to create his.
Students also calculated the area of some rectangular gardens using the formula and multiplication while this student worked on finding area by counting the squares and using smaller numbers because he's working on counting to 10. The students designed their own square foot gardens using graph paper. The requirement was that they had to be 10 square feet of space or less.
And then our student, who was working on counting, counted out seeds from our seed packets to match the other students' diagrams so that they could take them home and use them or to share with someone in our community. And of course, we planted our school garden.
In this video, the teacher explains how she made cross-curricular connections for her students using a real-world project on gardening.
