Artist Christy Hale has illustrated many award-winning books, including Elizabeti s Doll, winner of the Ezra Jack Keats Award, and its two sequels.

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Our School Garden! is a fictional story about how young Michael, new to the city and the school, experiences the garden through the changing seasons of the school year.

1 Our School Garden! is a fictional story about how young Michael, new to the city and the school, experiences the garden through the changing seasons of the school year. He discovers not just how vegetables grow but how a community can grow from a garden. The book, written in verse, also features sidebars on many aspects of school gardening and a resource page. Author Rick Swann (rickswann.com) is la former school librarian in Seattle: Being in a garden is like reading a good book: you re never sure what is on the next page, but you can t wait to get there and find out. Artist Christy Hale has illustrated many award-winning books, including Elizabeti s Doll, winner of the Ezra Jack Keats Award, and its two sequels. The stone soup of books about school gardening --School Library Journal Our School Garden! draws upon the best parts of what a school garden can be a place to spark curiosity, explore, work hard, laugh, make friends and deepen academic learning. Kyle Cornforth, Director, Edible Schoolyard Berkeley From educational opportunities to building community and friendships, this picture book introduces the rewards of school gardens... Booklist Before Reading Have you ever gone somewhere where you didn t know anyone? What do you think it would feel like to be a new student at a school? What would make it easier for you to feel welcome and to make friends if you were new at a school? After Reading How did the school garden help Michael become part of the school community? What did you learn about gardening from reading this book? What do you think you would like best if you had a school garden?

2 Taste Tests In Scavenger Hunt Michael has to pick his favorite green from chard, collards, lettuce, arugula, mustard and kale. Which would be your favorite? Purchase these greens at the store or substitute if you can t find them all (or grow them in your school garden!), wash them well and cut them up into small pieces so that every student can sample them. Have students fill out the chart. Afterwards you can graph the class results. Kind of green Rate them 1 (like the most) to 6 (like the least) after tasting them Collards Lettuce Arugula Chard Mustard Kale

3 What plant parts do you eat? Read The Enormous Carrot and also Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens. See how many edible plants your class can name for each part of the plant listed below. Some plants might be listed in more than one category! Seeds Fruits Flowers Leaves Stems Roots

4 Recipe Math The recipe in School Garden Stone Soup serves 25 to 30 people. Most cookbooks serve 4 to 6 people. Get a recipe book out of your library. Some of my favorite recipe books for kids are by Mollie Katzen: Salad People, Honest Pretzels, and Pretend Soup, but any cookbook will do. Write down the list of ingredients and note how many people it is supposed to serve. Can you double it to serve twice as many? Can you triple it? How much of each ingredient would you need to serve 25 to 30? Harvest Days The sidebar for Harvest Day mentions several harvest festivals: Thanksgiving, Sukkoth, the Chinese Moon Festival, and Pongal. There are many others. Go to your school library and research one of these harvest festivals or a different one from another part of the world. In your research try to answer these questions: When and where does this festival take place? How old is this festival? What special foods and other rituals are connected to this festival? How does it bring the community together? Nature Journaling One of my favorite garden activities is to write down what I do or see in the garden in a journal. You can make a blank journal just by folding several papers in half and sewing or stapling them in the center. It looks great decorated with leaf prints and pictures of the butterflies and other animals you might see in a garden. I note the date I visit the garden and then write in what I did there that visit. You can keep a nature journal for visits to your backyard, a local park or anywhere else that there s a patch of green!

5 Food Drive In Homonym: One Word, Many Meanings Michael writes about taking food from the school garden to the local food bank. My school supplies the local food bank with vegetables we grow in our school garden, but your school can also organize a food drive for your local food bank. It s easy and fun. Weigh the food or count the number of items you collect and make a giant bar graph somewhere at school where you keep track of your progress. Just make sure to check with the food bank before you start so you know what kinds of food they need. Make a Poster! During World War I and World War II the United States government made posters that encouraged people to grow their own food so that farmed food could be sent to help the troops fighting overseas and to supply food to citizens in countries that couldn t grow enough food because the war was being fought there. There are lots of old posters to look at online. Just search for Victory Garden posters. Each poster has a clear, short message and a picture that supports it. Why would you encourage gardening now? What other messages would you want people to see in order to help improve your school, community or the world? See if you can come up with a positive message that encourages people to improve their community and add a colorful graphic to it. Decorate the halls of your school! Food Riddles Michael s Garden Riddles showed that he had looked closely at vegetables and figured out some of the traits that made them unique. Take a fruit or vegetable that you know pretty well and see if you can find something about it that only that vegetable has. Now make the vegetable tell what that trait is: I am. Or I have You now have a riddle!

6 Lift- the- Flap Worm Book In Compost we learn how worms help nature recycle by helping turn decaying plants into soil. Earthworms are amazing creatures. There are several good kids books (Yucky Worms by Vivian French is one) about worms and some fun worm web sites for kids, too. For this book you ll need 4 facts about earthworms that you find really interesting. Read one of the worm books or check out one of the web sites about worms and write down your facts. Then follow the diagrams below to put your worm book together.

7 After cutting the flaps and folding them to make doors, glue the two halves of the folded paper together avoiding getting glue behind the flaps that you will want to be able to open and close. Write your four facts on the blank paper behind the flaps. Last, push the middle fold outward and the two quarter folds inward so that you end up with a book that when closed is the size of one of the folds. Decorate and title the front cover. If you want you can write about yourself on the back cover.

8 Concrete Poem These are also called shape poems, which describes them perfectly: they are poems written in the shape of the subject of the poem, like Spring Plant Sale is written in the shape of a flower pot holding a seedling what is sold at a school garden spring plant sale. To do a concrete poem, you describe an object using poetic language, then arrange the lines in the shape of what you are describing. Cooperation and Companions In Three Sisters we learn about companion planting different species of plants that when planted together help each other grow. There are animals that cooperate and help each other as well. It s called cooperation when it s animals of the same species, like humans. It s called mutualism when it s animals of different species helping each other. A children s book about these animal pairs is Weird Friends: unlikely allies in the animal kingdom by Jose Aruego and Ariane Dewey. An example of this is sea anemones and clownfish. The poisonous stingers of the sea anemone protect the clownfish from enemies, but the clownfish protects the sea anemones from butterfly fish that would eat them. Why is it helpful to have companions? Either write an essay about the benefits of having companions or write a short report about animals that help each other in the wild (mutualism) or plants that help each other grow (companion planting).

oregon harvest for schools I WINTER SQUASH page 1

oregon harvest for schools I WINTER SQUASH page 1 Promoting Oregon WINTER SQUASH Wondering what Oregon vegetable to feature this fall or winter? Try winter squash. Winter squash comes in a variety of sizes, shapes, and colors. Try several varieties and