Cornell Cooperative Extension Community Horticulture

By Erin Marteal (Cornell’s Garden-Based Learning Program Project Leader )

Recently, I visited a third grade classroom with a shiny red toolbox in my hand. There were no hammers, pliers or wrenches in the box, yet the tools contained inside were perfectly suited for my purpose.

Had you been there, you would have seen the unlikely contents: seed catalogs, index cards with pictures of vegetable varieties glued on, an envelope containing pieces of paper with funny names, and a CD envelope with vegetable pictures peeking through the cellophane window. And the effect these humble tools helped me create was even more surprising.

With my tools I set-up three activity stations in under three minutes, and facilitated a conversation to introduce the foundation concept for the activities: Biodiversity.

The very foundation for ecological stability and the main characteristic of nature, it turns out, is a concept perfectly suited to the intellect and experience of third graders, at least the ones I visited. They amazed me with their acuity at grasping the concept of biodiversity through a group process of defining the word, arriving at a definition that reflected a real understanding of biodiversity.

I asked them to share examples of ways that biodiversity shows up in their daily lives. We talked about cultural diversity, diversity of food preferences, clothing, and pets, and what the world would look like without biodiversity – scary! I introduced vegetable varieties as one very visible way that biodiversity appears in the garden.

After a brief introduction of the activities, the class of 20 counted off by threes and went to their first station. Group one started at the matching game, where they spread out a dozen or so funny names, like rat tail and bon bon, and pictures of vegetable varieties. As a group, they deftly maneuvered the names to match the pictures until each match had a mate. Using the answer key that had been hiding in the toolbox, I set aside the correct matches, leaving the rest to be reconsidered and rematched, repeating this process until all were correct. A lot of negotiations were seen at that table, as they reasoned and debated over why one name was much better suited to this variety than that, while bustling to get their matches made in time.

At the second station, students were “hired” to write variety descriptions for a seed company. Budding writers turned out innovative descriptions, such as : “‘Fire Peppers’: A camp fire in your garden; spicy and sweet,” and “ ‘Earth Toned Marker Box’: This corn tastes like rat poison, decoration only, DO NOT EAT.”

Group three found scissors, seed catalogs and magazines, poster board and glue sticks to create a biodiversity collage. As a slight twist on the usual collage experience, each student explained to the others in the group why each image represents biodiversity to them as they pasted it on the board, which sparked some interesting discussion.

Five red toolboxes just like this one have been awarded to youth groups around New York state who will be piloting Vvi (Vegetable varieties investigation) this spring and summer. To learn more about piloting Vvi, a project of Cornell’s Garden-Based Learning Program, visit vvi.cce.cornell.edu, or contact Erin Marteal: enm6@cornell.edu, 607.255-9911.

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