Making, Working, Doing

Who knew how much fun it is to break up garlic heads into individual cloves, and how challenging! Also surprising it was to discover how many LE students like to eat raw garlic! We learned how to plant garlic cloves which will become a spring harvest crop at Wright Locke Farm on Thursday. Along with preparing the cloves, the children loaded up a wheelbarrow with compost, spread it out over the garlic bed inside the greenhouse, and planted the garlic cloves six inches apart and a knuckle deep. Experiences like this are a part of our monthly trips to the farm!

In a New York Times article that I recently read entitled, How Makers Make the Classroom More Inclusive, the notion that children learn better when they are using the creative process to accomplish real-life tasks or solving real-life challenges. It is getting messy, making mistakes, and risk taking. We all left the farm with dirt under our fingernails, greenhouse dust in our noses, and smelling like garlic. What was the reward for getting our farm work? Building fairy houses in the forest of course!!