Can a garden of our imaginations help us work with our real garden on the Opal Playground?
We are working hard to get our school garden up and growing this year. The Early K and the Preschool share a garden box that our two classrooms are responsible for.
We have been using the book My Garden, by Kevin Henkes as inspiration to create a garden of our imaginations in our classroom. We are hoping this garden will help to spark interest and create understanding of the actual live garden we are working with. Here is a peek into our imaginary garden…
After reading My Garden we asked the students: If you could plant something and have it grow into any plant you could imagine, what kind of plant would you grow?
As they were drawing their ideas, AH said, "We should put all our plants together and make a garden!" And so we did. The children were excited to share their plants with one another.
DW- This is a really special plant, it grows on Mother’s day. The flower is kind of purple with a green stem.
CG – This is a squirrel tree. The squirrels are alive. When you pick the squirrel it has a little tiny owie on the back of its tail but it will heal. You can play with the squirrels.
LB – This is a jellybean tree. Jelly beans grow on it and you can pick them and eat them.
AH – What flavor are they?
LB – It is a rainbow jellybean tree. The jelly beans can do stuff. The tree can change color. If you say a color it will change to a color you say.
CC -This is a tornado tree. It will destroy a house. This is a skunk tree, whenever that tree feels like someone is gonna hit it, it grows a skunk and it sprays them.
PH – This is an oatmeal tree. It grows oatmeal every day.
F – This is a superhero tomato plant. You can play with the superheroes and eat tomatoes and when the juice comes out of the tomatoes you can swim in the house. The superheroes grow the tomatoes.
DM – My plant is kinda fun because it grows candy canes and candy corn.
PH – I like candy corn!
LH – This is a fairy plant and me. I am playing with the fairies. They would play on the flower – it is their home – but when they go for a walk they can leave the flower.
RS – This is a bee tree. The bees put honey in the candy corn. If you touch the stem they will sting you. The bees will give you the candy corn.
SP – This is a sushi and candy corn tree and I can climb all the way up to pick, pick, pick. The blue things are when bad guys come – the blue branches are laser branches if a bad guy comes they laser him. You have to hop over the blue branches.
We also thought about what the seeds for our plants would look like. What size would they be? What would they look like on the outside and what would they have inside? Clay and drawing helped us think about these questions and we created our seeds.
PH:
Oatrmeal seeds are supposed to have a crack in them because I have seen one. I have oatmeal for breakfast almost every morning.
That is the little plant inside and there is the food.
CC:
The seed is so cool because it has eyes and a mouth so it knows to move if there was bad guys.
Teacher: Who are the bad guys for the seed?
The seed robbers or the seed thiefs. It (the seed) makes a little hideout underground.
CG: It has tiny hairs on it from the squirrel. The hair is sticky so it sticks to the seed.
Inside it is their hair and their food.
When all the plants we created were in the garden we realized there were things that were important to a garden that were still missing from our garden like rain and sun and paths and bees, so we added them with cray pas. It was tricky to add to a collaborative piece because we had to really slow down so we could make sure we were respecting others work and ideas.
Our imaginary garden is beautiful to look at, but it is also a place to imagine garden stories and experiences. How might one get the food offered on a certain tree?, what kinds of protection do we have for bad guys coming into the garden?, who might you walk through the garden with? As we continue to work in our live garden outside, we will use the imaginary garden as a stepping stone, reflecting back when we need to…
and imagining the possibilities ahead.
