Example Lesson Plan: The 7 Layers of a School Garden Lesson Plan

Let's dive into creating the best gardening lesson plans that will help you grow a flourishing garden while aligning with your curriculum and boosting student engagement. This article comes as a continuance to the previous blog post titled "Grow Minds, Not Just Plants: Creating Lessons That Enrich and Engage". In that article I walked you through how to go about writing a series of cohesive lesson plans for your gardening project. Go give it a read before this so gain better perspective of what's discussed here.

Understanding the Essential 7 Layers of an Effective Gardening Lesson Plan:

To grow a successful garden, whether it's a school garden, classroom garden, or any educational garden, you need a well-structured plan. Here we'll explore the seven layers that make it effective:

Indoor or Outdoor: Decide if you're growing a garden indoors or outdoors.

Seeds List: Determine the types of seeds you'll be planting.

Tasks List: Identify all the tasks required for planting and maintaining the garden.

Lessons List: Plan the educational lessons related to gardening, such as photosynthesis, biodiversity, and more.

Timing and Placement: Figure out the best time to plant each seed and where they'll be placed.

Schedule: Organize all tasks, lessons, and timing into your school schedule.

Extension Activities: Plan additional hands-on activities like building bee hotels or solar cookers.

Missing any of these layers will result in your lessons lacking, engagement plummeting and your garden failing.

Sneak Peak into a Lesson Plan from the OASIS programs:

Sunlight is the topic of one of the lesson plans we have inside Oasis Classroom, Oasis School and Caja Oasis programs. Let's take a closer look at our this lesson plan. This plan incorporates all seven layers, ensuring a comprehensive learning experience for the students. In my latest YouTube Podcast, I visually show you not only this lesson plan but also the accompanying student booklet, classroom wall poster, and the supplies checklist. For a good visual sneak peak go to that video.

Let's see how the 7 layers are incorporated into this one lesson plan about Sunight:

Indoor or Outdoor: Let's say that we've decided to grow a classroom garden.

Seeds List: We've gotten our seeds list sorted and we know that sunflower is one of the seeds.

Tasks List: We've had our tasks list prepared with everything we know we need to do to grow this classroom garden and starting sunflower seeds indoors is one of the tasks. We've also written a step-by-step activity guide and we know how to lead the students through the seed starting.

Lessons List: We have out lessons list and we know that we want to teach students about sunlight's role in plant growth. And sunflower is a suitable plant to grow during the sunlight lesson.

Timing and Placement: We've figured out the timing for all of our seeds and we know that we need to plant sunflowers in May for optimal growth.

Schedule: Now we will integrate the lesson into our school calendar, ensuring students have enough time to experiment with sunlight, and learn about it while observing and caring for the sunflowers.

Extension Activities: As fun extension activities for the sunlight lesson, we can engage students in building sundials and solar cookers.

And that's how you write each lesson. But remember that in order to grow an abundant garden one lesson is not enough. You need to write at least 10 weeks worth of lesson plans so you can teach everything you want, connect it all to your curriculum, and grow a variety of many plants.

Our OASIS programs provide a wealth of resources, including student booklets, classroom wall posters, and materials checklists on top of 11 lesson plans similar to the example you saw in this article. Each lesson plan comes with detailed lecture notes, discussion prompts, and hands-on activity guides to facilitate effective teaching.

Creating cohesive lesson plans for gardening not only enhances student learning but also fosters a deeper connection with nature. If you haven't already, be sure to listen to episodes 33 and 34, where we discussed the foundational steps in lesson plan writing.