A Scenery of Greenery: Plants in the Classroom

Although this blog often focuses on ways to teach outside of the learning space, we will regularly also note ways that you can bring the outside world in.

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The new school year is here. One of my best friends firmly believes that July 25th is the best day of the year. Perfectly halfway through our Summer here in NY, he says that it’s a day of freedom, a day to indulge in your passions and appreciate the beauty in your life with absolute gratitude. For me, July 25th of 2020, rather than a carefree romp through a beautiful, heartwarming day, was riddled with thoughts, worries and questions about what will happen when our school year in New York resumes in September. The COVID quarantine has taught (forced) me to have more patience with unpredictability than usual. But it’s impossible, especially as a parent of two young children, not to wonder what will happen in a few short weeks.

As you plan for the return of your students, or plan for the next few months for your own children at home, in this post I’ll encourage you to consider bringing the natural world into your learning space.

Working in a school focused on sustainable living, it’s unavoidable that plants would creep their way into my classroom. But for me, it wasn’t a fight. I’ve kept plants in my home for many years and, like many others who crave the natural, outdoor world, caring for plants became a cherished hobby during quarantine. But you don’t need to be a professional gardener, own a nursery or live in the mountains to reap the benefits of natural things in a classroom. Below you’ll read some ideas on how to integrate plants into your learning space and lessons. I hope this will be applicable for formal classroom settings, as well as remote learning from home and for caregivers looking to fill their day with fun and educational activities.

There are many reasons why plants can be beneficial for learning spaces, including classrooms and homes during remote learning. In her book, Choice Time: How to Deepen Learning Through Inquiry and Play, Renee Dinnerstein explains how a learning space speaks to children the moment that they enter. “Even the simplest decisions can speak volumes. A terrarium placed at the eye level of a six-year-old, for example, says something very different than a terrarium placed out of reach on top of a bookshelf. When a classroom speaks, the message is obvious to all who pass through its doors.” Plants in a classroom send a clear message that living things of all kinds- children, plants and pets alike- are valued.

Benefits of Plants in the Learning Space

Emotional Well Being: For decades, researchers have been studying the effects of plants and gardens in different environments, including schools and hospitals. These studies have proven over and over that exposure to nature, even when indoors, can significantly improve emotional well-being. In his research, Dr. Roger Ulrich states that, “many views of vegetation or garden-like features elevate levels of positive feelings (pleasantness, calm),and reduce negatively toned emotions such as fear, anger, and sadness. Certain nature scenes effectively sustain interest and attention, and accordingly can serve as pleasant distractions that may diminish stressful thoughts. … laboratory and clinical investigations have found that viewing nature settings can produce significant restoration within less than five minutes” (Ulrich, 1981; Ulrich et al., 1991). So what does this mean for a learning space? It means children with big feelings about an assignment, children upset about an argument with a peer or sibling, children who have concerns about home, all have a balance for these emotions through exposure to natural objects in the classroom.

Attention: The Attention Restoration Theory initially proposed that adult attention can be improved by exposure to nature. Since its proposal, the theory has also been tested and proven with children, especially those with ADD.

Responsibility: Keeping plants and living things in the classroom can develop responsibility and accountability. Students in a classroom or children at home can take on the role of gardener, learning how to care for different living things and their specific needs. In the book Home Grown, written by Ben Hewitt, Hewitt explains the value in teaching his child to care for the beets on their land. Simultaneously, Hewitt describes that, in the process of a child developing responsibility through caring for living things, as caretakers we may also have to develop a practice of patience in the process.

“We made a conscious decision early in the boys’ life to sacrifice a degree of order and convenience so they might ‘work’ alongside us, and this has required us to relinquish control in ways we never could have imagined. Some of this relinquishing involved accepting the inevitable mistakes and messes that result from their learning– the row of fledgling beets they pulled ,thinking they were ‘weeds’…some of it was simply letting go of our expectations regarding how long a particular task might take. It takes a hell of a lot of patience to include young children in productive work, and it requires humbling yourself to the reality that it is not going to be as ‘productive’ as you’d like. Except, of course, it is, because some of what you’re producing is a child with confidence, skills and resourcefulness…The boys have now developed into legitimately productive contributors to our home and farm. They no longer pull up beets by mistakes…to learn how not to pull up beets, they had to pull some.”— Ben Hewitt

Lesson Planning: The most engaging lessons may sometimes be the most creative, but that doesn’t mean that teachers need to break the bank to purchase or create materials that aren’t already available to them. Using the natural elements of your classroom, you can create lessons that engage students in their learning, and build relationships with their learning space at the same time. Integrate living things into your lessons! Write a poem about a plant or strange piece of fruit, measure your plants, weigh your plants, use them in I-Spy. Dissect different vegetables, conduct experiments around watering schedules. Real, natural objects have textures, smells, and sights that photos and plastic reproductions can’t supply. Any way for students to engage with their everyday learning space during a lesson helps to promote academic learning and foster love for their space simultaneously.

Activities

Outdoor Walks and Field Visits: Experiencing nature is, most obviously, easiest when you’re outdoors. Much of this post has focused on bringing the outdoors in, primarily because I understand that going on an outdoor nature walk or a field visit to a natural location may not be as available to everyone. Although being outdoors is safer than indoors in a group setting during the COVID outbreak, going to a frequently visited garden, or safely managing a handful of children in an outdoor setting may not be practical for some teachers or caregivers at home. That being said, if available to you, a nature walk is a simple way to engage children in exciting, open-ended and often fun and dirty activities that encourage imagination, wonder and analysis. Look at that weird rock. What’s under it? How do those bugs breathe under there? Some bugs are much faster than others. The soil under there is so compacted and wetter than the surrounding dirt. Did it rain recently? Where do birds go when it rains? Can birds go underground like these bugs? Why can the bugs go underground and not birds?

Creating with Natural Items: During an outdoor walk, I always encourage students who wish to collect one item from the walk that they can safely take back to the classroom (meaning, it’s already on the ground or in a place that will not hurt the environment by collecting it). After returning, we often share and examine these objects, which can then be used as art materials to recreate objects from the outside world. When studying turtles, my students collected items from each location that we visited and used them to build models of different habitats that we were learning about during our reading workshop, including dry grasses for the Savannah and sticks and twigs for the forests.

Take Apart Tub: Having a take apart center, a space where children can deconstruct something and see the parts inside, is a fantastic way for children to examine the way that things in their daily lives work and operate. Jackie, who writes about teaching in the early learning years on her blog, Roots and Wings, believes that, “when children are given opportunities to grow ‘roots’ (guided instruction of foundational skills) AND wings (independent exploration and discovery), they thrive and flourish!” Take apart centers offer students the opportunity to do both of these things, as they can serve as a practice in writing and describing skills, as well as a way to imagine and predict what will be inside of your object. Jackie has re imagined the take apart center to include natural elements of the outside world. In the take-apart tub, students identify whether an object is living, nonliving or once living. They then take apart an object and write down what they’ve found inside. The take apart tub is a fantastic way to bring the outside world into your learning space in a way that engages children in a tactile activity. The take apart tub, like take apart centers with primarily mechanical objects, can also be extended into creative activities, using the pieces of what you’ve taken apart to create a new object.

Outdoor Learning Choice Boards: On her blog, Jackie also offers supports for outdoor activities for young learners through her Outdoor Learning Choice board. If you would like to provide some structure in your outdoor time, especially since there may be a LOT of it in the next few months, you can use ideas from this type of choice board. Children can choose activities to complete, ranging from writing sight words with a stick in the dirt to making imprints of bark, leaves and rocks using play-doh. You can find Jackie’s choice board here and can create your own list of options for children based on your own outdoor environment too!

There are endless possibilities once you introduce live plants and flowers into your learning space. Whether teaching in a classroom, caring for a cohort of children to keep them safe on off-learning days or supplementing your child’s education at home, the benefits of working with plants are emotional, social and traditionally academic. As described by Stephanie, “You, as the plant parent, are responsible for nurturing it so that it grows and flourishes.  No two plants are the same, and all have different needs that need to be met in order for it to thrive.  This is something that my students started to understand as they were in this space.  They learned to appreciate the beauty and growth of a new leaf.  They learned that we in fact eat every single part of a plant.  They learned how to better work together.  All this, just through introducing some plants into the classroom.  I would say that’s pretty good. “