With spring just around the corner, it’s a great time to plan and think about your school garden design. Whether starting a new garden or expanding an existing one, involving students in the design process provides an excellent learning opportunity!
Tactile interactions with nature, observations of plant growth, and scientific discoveries—both big and small—unfold in the school garden, with learning often beginning before the first seed is planted. Therefore, student engagement should occur during the early garden conception stages. Involving students in the planning and design process fosters critical thinking skills, cultivates a sense of ownership, and reinforces their ideas' value. Remember, the garden is for the students. Allow them to participate genuinely in the process, not just be one part of the process.
Students should be encouraged to think creatively and ask visionary questions. Questions that can cultivate the intended outcome include: What would they like to see in the garden? Or, what would they want to grow? Encouraging students to make a drawn garden plan or simply capturing their input on what they’d like to see in the garden is a great place to start.
Designing with a Kit of Parts
Designing with students can be simple. To capture ideas, use readily available materials, such as Legos or large pads of paper and markers (see Figure 1). The most important goal is to help students become critical thinkers, considering their physical environment, how they would like to use the space, exploring plants, and daring them to think creatively.
(Figure 1: Students brainstorming a garden plan using Legos)
Our team developed a school garden design kit that provides students with standardized garden pieces. This "kit" shifts the focus away from artistic expression, allowing students to concentrate on essential design features such as spatial arrangement and circulation, garden programming, crop selection, and generating other design ideas. Students are less concerned about how pretty the plan is or whether it looks as good as their neighbors' designs. Instead, they focus on the ideas in the plan.
This design freedom helps bolster confidence in design and generates substantive ideation. Teachers can create their own garden pieces or take inspiration from this standardized “kit”, which includes popular garden features drawn to scale, such as planter boxes, benches, a storage shed, a compost bin, and pollinator flowers. Students who have additional ideas beyond the icons provided are encouraged to draw them directly on the plan. Using dry-erase markers on laminated activity sheets provides additional design flexibility (see Figure 2 below of students generating ideas for their garden design).
Want more garden ideas? Register for our School Garden Course this Spring!
