Talent Maker in Constantin Ianculescu School, Carcea (Romania)
Building a garden into the classroom
Gardening is a great way to meet science standards, no matter what grade you teach. For years, students have been writing about plants in their notebooks, but actually this was the moment I could see them planting the seeds and watching the plant grow in their classrooms.
At first, they planted the seeds into plastic cups and could also draw whatever they wanted on their cups.
During the next phase, they just had to place the cups on the window shelf and watch them grow.
The students had to take care of the plants until spring, water them and make sure they had enough light.
Then they built a garden somewhere in the schoolyard so that they could move the plants, now too big for the plastic cups.
The students had great fun painting the tires and filling them up with soil.
During the final stage of the process, the student moved the grown plants from the cups, now too small for them, into the garden they had created with the tires outside.
Shortly after, they could observe small tomatoes on the plants.
Earth structure
th graders learnt about the structure and composition of the Earth by recreating it out of Play-Doh.
After creating the model, they also made small labels where they named the different layers.
We used the model they could see and touch to talk about interesting facts such as the composition and thickness of each layer or information about the density and temperatures present.
Each team prepared a short report explaining the different layers of the Earth.
