Positives

• Students will practice important scientific skills in hands-on and engaging experiments.
• The troubleshooting tips and teacher resources will help ensure your school garden is successful!

Additional Prerequisites

• This is part four of a six-part series called School Gardening 101 by the New York Botanical Garden. The first part is an introduction, the second part is about soil, and the third part is about selecting and starting seeds.
• Teachers must provide materials for the experiments such as potting soil, seeds, pots, egg cartons, cotton balls, and plastic wrap.
• The last page of the Lesson Topic: Seed Germination document is a student worksheet that teachers can print to track the seed growth.
• In the Tip Sheet: Troubleshooting Guide: Seedling Management document, the link to About.com's Common Mistakes in Seedling Management is broken.

Differentiation

• Both lesson plans include optional ideas to extend the experiments, which teachers can use to make the lessons more challenging for older students.
• To modify the lessons for younger students consider conducting the experiments as a class.
• Both lesson plans require multiple weeks to complete the experiments. To save time, students can conduct both experiments simultaneously.
• Teachers can make connections in math classes by creating graphs of the growth data collected in the experiments.
• ELL students or lower grade levels may need additional support with some of the scientific vocabulary such as germination and photosynthesis.