Tribewanted: Vorovoro

The first Green Club lesson went really well and the children were incredibly sponge-like and enthusiastic and are actually far more aware of green issues than I gave them credit for. The session ended with a vegetable patch of class 5 at Mali District School’s very own making, proudly labelled and lovingly waterered.



Here is the lesson plan that we used for this session, which I have drawn up to put in what will eventually be the Green Club pack for future tribemembers to use if they can/want. Any ideas for improvements etc will be most welcomed!



GREEN CLUB

Lesson 1: Grow Your Own Veg



AIM:



To encourage the children to both see the fun and the practical benefits of growing their own vegetables, in terms of health, sustainability and environmental impact. This lesson will involve the theory behind the importance of growing your own food as well as the practical; by the end of this session the children will have a small patch of their own to take responsibility for and to watch grow.



PREPARATION:



- Go into the school and discuss the possibility of setting up a Green Club with the teachers. Ask them to allocate the year group which they think would benefit the most from the Green Club at this time.

- Ask if we can have a small plot for planting vegetables on school grounds.



TOOLS REQUIRED:



- 2 forks

- 1 spade

- Paint and paintbrushes for making/labeling the various parts of the patches

- Scrap wood for labels

- A saw

- Hammer

- nails

- Chalk

- A blackboard



(We bought the following for the school to keep as we felt it would encourage them to take care of their own patch if they had their own tools by which to do so- they are not expensive so ask your Chief if you can take it from her/his budget):



- watering can

- rake

- seeds- buy an assortment of approximately 6 packets to plant, depending on the size the school allocates to you and buy some extras to give to the children as quiz prizes.



INTRODUCTION:



- Take the children and all the tools outside. A more informal setting encourages the children to see Green Club as fun and different from normal school activities.

- Explain about the aims of the Green Club.



LESSON:



- Game 1: Start with a simple warm-up exercise. Stand in a circle and pass a ball around the group- when the ball is thrown to you, you must say your name along with your favourite vegetable.

- Game 2: Play ‘Guess The Veg’- get someone to come up to the blackboard and draw a vegetable- the first person to guess the vegetable correctly is the next one to go up and draw a vegetable, and so on. Perhaps do a vegetable cultural exchange by showing some of the weird and wonderful things that grow where you come from.

- Group discussion:  i) Why eat vegetables?- health etc

ii) Why grow your own vegetables?- saves you family money, plants are good because they produce oxygen and eat carbon dioxide, the less food miles the less pollution (they will be right by your home rather than entailing a boat/car trip to the local shop), etc



- Show the seed cycle on the blackboard, thus teaching about how once you start growing vegetables, their very seeds will then become new plants and so on thus helping in living more sustainably.



- Explain briefly the incredible varieties of seed dispersal- be as animated as you like!:

• gravity – heavy seeds will just fall off the plant.

• wind – very fine seeds will blow away on the wind. Some seeds have special parachutes or wings to help them fly, for example, dandelions.

• hooks – the seeds are covered with hooks which catch on to a passing animals’ fur; they then catch a free ride to another place where they are rubbed off later.

• animals – the seeds look like tasty treats for the animals to eat, but they pass undigested through the animal. Animals, including birds and insects, sometimes bury the seeds.

• pepperpot – the seed-pod is like a little pepperpot and sprinkles the seeds over quite a wide area.

• exploding – the seed-pod bursts suddenly, throwing all the seeds out over a large area.

• floating – some seeds grow with air trapped in them, so they can float away from the parent plant.

- Amaze the children with some exciting seed facts, e.g.:

• The largest seed in the world is the double coconut. It can measure up to 50cm (1.6ft) around the middle! Coconuts have a fibrous coating and an air space inside them, because they need to be able to float to a new home. Some coconuts have floated 2,000km over the sea before they find dry land!

• Seeds provide the world’s daily food. Your breakfast cereal and toast, your pasta or pizza lunch and your rice dish for tea all started life as seeds from different grasses.

• Some orchid seed-pods hold 3 million seeds.



GARDEN TIME:



- explain to the children that we hope one of the products of Green Club will be that they will be able to take some vegetables home for their family to eat, which is both good for them in terms of nourishment, for the family in financial terms and will be beneficial for the planet in so many ways too. Also let the children know how Fiji is such a perfect place for growing vegetables as the climate and richness of the soil equates to a fantastic environment for quick and quality growth.

- Split the children up into diggers, planters, waterers and sign painters. Make a garden!



END:



- Once the garden is done, all sit back down together and share around some snacks (we found dried salted peas were a good snack as they were tasty, familiar to the children and were also real examples of very edible seeds!).

- Quiz: do a quick true/false quiz covering what we have talked about today. The 2 winners get a bag of seeds to take home as a prize and are also this weeks 2 gardening monitors, in charge of daily watering and weeding.