Grow School Greens

There is an increasing focus on organically grown produce in society. What are the benefits? What are the pitfalls?

The Grow School Greens WebQuest was created for students to learn how to grow and care for their own vegetable garden and look at it in terms of large scale production.

It is a continuation of prior lessons learning the life cycle of plants and classifying fruits and vegetables and further lessons will be centered on large scale vegetable production - supply and demand. We will incorporate perspectives from both producers and suppliers, study the impact of chemicals on the environment and how organically grown products can taste different.

This unit of work also focuses on honing students IT skills. There is an Excel tutorial to demonstrating how to create a timeline. This activity is also leading onto teaching students time management. A PowerPoint tutorial shows students how to make presentaions including changing backgrounds and text type, inserting graphics and special effects.   

This WebQuest is designed to take approximately 15 weeks. As you are planting and watching vegetables grow, the students may want to continue to care for their garden for the entire school year.

Most seedlings take 10-12 weeks to produce and the garden is being planted in week 3 therefore it is highly likely that you will have some holidays before you see any produce. For this reason, it is best not to start this WebQuest in term 4 as the children won't be given the opportunity to see results before they go on long summer holidays.

I haven't created any specific lesson plans as I would prefer for the students to work at their own pace. This is why I have asked them to construct a time line in step two. I would have a meeting with them after they have completed step three (and thus the time line) and plan adequate class time for them to use.

Ideally, each group of students would be working on different WebQuests and WebQuest time is scheduled into term programming. Students can also chose to work on their projects when they finish other activities early or have free time.