Edible School Yard and Global Village

I just finished watching the video about The Edible School Yard, which is at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in California. It was such a great video and I loved the teaching methods that were used on a day-to-day basis. At this school, the students are taught things such as math, science, responsibility, and life lessons all from a garden. The students are responsible for growing the garden themselves and they get to see the finished product at the end of each season by cooking foods using the plants that they grew naturally. This is such a cool idea for teaching students about how they can learn from anything, even a garden.

This video was not only an entertaining one, but it also provides teachers with ideas for their own classrooms and how they can use the same methods to teach. One thing that would be fun, would be for me to make my students grow their own mini gardens in the classroom. We could do this by using the typical seed-in-cup method, but it would still provide me with the tools to teach them responsibility and even how the plants grow. Gardening is a way of teaching science because the students can learn about the water cycle and how the sun helps the plants grow. I think that any way of incorporating nature into the classroom is amazing, and I will definitely be doing it when I start teaching!

The next video that I watched was a video about The Global Village located in Perryville, Arkansas. This "village" is actually an overnight experience for local middle schoolers to attend and learn about other cultures that are living in poverty. What is is great about it though is that it is a first hand experience of what poverty in other countries looks and feels like. The kids are taken to the village where they are then divided up into families and refugees. Each family is given certain supplies, but the refugees are given nothing and must either deal or beg the others for food throughout the night. This is experience is a great life lesson and a lesson about what is going on around the world. It motivates students to get involved and educated about their world and learn how they can help.

The Global village is a great teaching tool for educators to use in their classrooms. One way that I would like to utilize the same concepts into my classroom is by teaching my students about people and animals from around the world and how they are living. I would even like to create a fake community of my own for the students to help with. It would be a great way to teach my students about other cultures still make it fun for them as well.