Budding botanists
Stopping to smell the flowers

Arlene Marturano

Arlene Marturano is a master gardener, writer, and educator. As an advocate of gardening as a tool for learning, she helped develop the Carolina Children's Garden at the Sandhill Research and Education Center. She is an education consultant with T.E.A.C.H.

marturano@yahoo.com First grade is a time for wonder, exploration, and growth in Ami Davis's class at Brennen Elementary.

The students have studied plants from a variety of perspectives: the botanist, artist, gardener, and consumer.

The classroom is furnished to invite investigation. A reading and research center is stocked with early childhood trade books on plants, a flower press, a mud- filled jar of creepy crawlers, and a board game for matching fruit and vegetable plants with their produce.

Each day a different student selects two plant books for the teacher to read to the class after lunch.

Being aware of one's surroundings is an important outcome of schooling.

Dash mists the Mother's Day marigolds.

The students visited a nursery to learn about flowering landscape plants in South Carolina, and a bulletin board displays each child's description and drawing of one plant. The students are becoming proficient in the language of plants around their home.

Children take turns misting the classroom schefflera, pothos, and marigolds. Marigolds propagated from seeds in the science lab are ready to be gifts for Mother's Day.

To understand the concept of germination and to observe root and shoot growth, each student embedded a pole bean seed on a wet paper towel inserted in a zip lock bag. They taped the bags to the wall of windows curtained in a cheerful sunflower pattern. Each day the children draw observations of the seeds and write a sentence describing the changes.

Learning to look is as important to a botanist as to an artist. First graders, by nature, love to draw and paint.

The budding botanists viewed paintings of artists who created botanical pieces: O'Keefe, Van Gogh, Monet, Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rivera among others. Each practiced painting in the style of one artist and reproduced a botanical masterpiece. The paintings captured the artist's style so well that onlookers can identify the artist.

(l to r) Garrett, Jordan and Cole display their pole bean seeds.

When the class visits the Cottle Strawberry Farm to find out how strawberry plants grow and multiply, they will pick baskets of berries and take them home to share with family and friends.

Soon parents across the Midlands receive children cultivated by caring teachers. To keep the seeds of learning growing throughout the summer, parents can capitalize on Davis's model by reading to and with children daily.

They can discuss, converse, and plan events for the day and week and provide materials for artistic expression and display the works.

They can grow a garden with children and use it as a cooperative learning center for the entire family. Each family member can write entries to a garden diary and read each other's notes.