School Gardening Part 3: Seed Starting

Positives

• Students will love seeing their seeds germinate and tracking their growth over time.
• The lesson plans foster important scientific skills like observing, classifying, and collecting data.
• The teacher documents provide critical information for teachers to select seeds and plan for the necessary amount and spacing.

Additional Prerequisites

• This is the third part of a six-part series called School Gardening 101 by the New York Botanical Garden. The first part is an introduction and the second part is about soil.
• Teachers can request free seed catalogs online. Alternatively, teachers can use online seed farm websites.
• Teachers will need to provide a variety of seeds, ziplock bags, magnifying glasses, paper towels, and staplers for the Seed Stew lesson plan.
• For the best chance of success, teachers should follow the suggestions and instructions in the tip sheets and teacher exercises.
• Some of the tip sheets contain broken links.

Differentiation

• The Seed Catalogue Search lesson plan is for Grades 3-5 but teachers can modify it for younger grades by completing it as a class with teachers reading the text out loud to support student understanding.
• Teachers can modify these lessons for middle school grade levels by incorporating more scientific vocabulary and instruction about plant structures and photosynthesis.
• The Top 20 School Garden Planting Combinations tip sheet has ideas for connecting the school garden projects to social studies, math, and other science topics. For example, a social studies class could create a global garden with plants from around the world, or a math class could use geometry to plan and construct plant beds.
• Build connections between this resource and climate change by discussing sustainable gardening practices and the harmful environmental impacts of large-scale food production.