Treehugger Babysitting: Episode 2- Urban Gardens

What a well-maintained garden! Good job
kids.

Hi everyone! This is GEEKs cofounder Katie M-T, bringing you the long-awaited, action-packed second episode of our new series, Treehugger Babysitting, which follows my adventures in environmental education with the kids I'm nannying this summer. 

In our first episode, I learned how to get the kids interested and engaged in environmentalism through art. Read through this whole post to see what sneaky education tactics I tried this time, or just skip to the bottom to see what I learned during this episode, summed up this time in haiku form.

Talk to Strangers

There are tons of easy environmental education projects that can be done at home (check out our resources page if you don't believe me), but during this episode I worked on getting the kids out and into our neighborhood. One of the first places we visited was the local library, and by chance we ran into several women and a few kids outside at the library's garden. They turned out to be a group of enthusiastic volunteers from all across the neighborhood who get together once a week  to work on the garden.

An artist's rendering of the fabled
Environmental Edutopia

I asked if the kids could help out, and one of the volunteers handed us gloves and pruning shears and put us in charge of deadheading flowers.

Environmental Edutopia
If you've ever worked with kids or been a kid, you'll probably agree that the gardening-at-the-library situation is basically an ideal setup for environmental education. Our Enviro-Edutopia (I really worked on that phrase guys) featured all the elements of a project that could keep the kids engaged: a social setting with other kids their age, a specific and doable task, an exciting element of controllable danger in the form of pruning shears, and a chance for the kids to improve their community in a very visible way. It also had an excellent sneaky education opportunity- the kids got a biology lesson when one of the experienced gardeners explained what deadheading actually does to flowers in a garden.

The sneaky education ninjas are back.

The gardening experience was so successful that the kids were eager to come back to work on the garden the next week.


Bringing It Home
I could tell that the kids really loved the gardening idea because aside from returning for several weeks to keep volunteering, they also wanted to plant things at their house. Unfortunately my gardening knowledge is so limited that we haven't had a plant survive this experience yet, but we'll keep working on it and I imagine that gardening at home would be a great project if I did some more research (Here, maybe?). 
I'll be sure to keep everyone updated on it.

What I Learned: The Haiku Version

This guy writes all my haiku for me.

A community
Holds much opportunity
For enviro ed.

It is difficult
To write complex ideas
In Haiku structure.

Okay, let's just consider this next part "free verse" poetry. In this episode, a coincidental meeting in my neighborhood's "downtown" area led to a really great environmental education experience when we started gardening at the local library. The big takeaway is that opportunities for enviro ed are everywhere, and taking just a short trip outside my comfort zone to start a conversation with someone led me to an opportunity I could have missed. 

Thank you for reading
We hope that you liked this post
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