Garden Patch Math

Tonight in class, Dr. Mangione brought up an excellent idea for using gardening in the classroom that I had honestly not thought of. Using gardening (science) to teach multiplication (math) - can we say integrated curriculum?!

But really, how could I not have made this connection? It makes perfect sense. When planting a garden, it is customary to arrange the plants in organized rows and columns. Planting a garden in such fashion helps to keep the plants spaced at good lengths for optimum growing potential and it also creates a perfect array by which we can teach students multiplication!

                                        Here is a standard multiplication chart:

                                           

                                         Here is a bird's eye view of a garden:

                                      

Do you notice any similarities? Essentially (if planted as such) a garden is a life size version of the array we use to represent multiplication tables! How cool is that?!

This means that before students have even planted a seed, the teacher can begin introducing them to multiplication concepts by letting the class work together to plan out the garden. Giving students an empty square like the one pictured below, with specific instructions on how many plants they will need to fit into the garden and allowing them to work to build an array provides students the opportunity to investigate multiplication ideas with out them even knowing it.

 

Then as the year progresses, students will begin to build on the foundation that was created working with rows of plants, designing a garden.

I also found an activity that takes this idea one step further by incorporating fractions. This activity is called Garden Patch Fractions and can be found here.

This is a sample of a students work after they had completed the activity. Essential using a garden patch grid or array the student fills in specific plants according to the directions. These could be in the form of guidelines for how the classroom garden needed to be planted or if done later in the year, students could actually use the classroom garden and represent it in their array. 

 

                             

This idea opened up a whole new door for me and I hope it does for you as well! Thank you Dr. Mangione for your though provoking instruction!