Pumpkins and Petunias

About the Book

If you are a teacher, parent, home schooler, after-school instructor, park or botanical garden interpreter, pre-school teacher or child development specialist, you will love this book. It is about things to do with children between the ages of 2 and 8 in all types of gardens. The activities, collected from outstanding teachers and the authors’ childhood use inquiry learning in response to the importance of being outdoors with children. The book explains how to select and adapt activities that are suitable for the specifi c garden and the specifi c children, and guidelines for safety. All of the activities are to be conducted outdoors and use the garden for content and materials, not just for a space. Forty-eight carefully selected activities are presented in outline form for easy selection and following. Each lesson includes the objectives, a brief word to the leader, materials in list form, directions for doing the activity, relation to the subject standards, and suggestions for related activities. The subject areas of the proposed book include all of the disciplines and the teaching strategies of inquiry, playing, questioning, creating, constructing, etc. The appendices match the activities to the National Core State Standards, Science for the Next Generation and curriculum standards of The National Association for the Education of Young Children.

About the Author

Esther Railton-Rice is well-known in environmental education. She has a lengthy list of publications that includes Teaching Science in an Outdoor Environment, Berkeley: U.C. Press, 1972. More recent writing appears as solicited chapters in books and journals, e.g. The Green Teacher. After working on a recreation department tot lot and teaching kindergarten and fi rst grade in Fremont, Michigan, she taught at the Battle Creek Outdoor Education Center in Michigan. This led to attaining a Doctorate in Education and a teaching appointment at California State University, East Bay in the Teacher Education Department. She enjoys playing with her grand-nieces and grandnephews, sharing her Chihuahua with the neighbor children, walking, gardening, and traveling. Irene Winston, is a biology teacher who docents in the Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Regional Park, Berkeley, California. She has written an activity guide for that California native plants garden plus several other articles on plant adaptations and lichens. Her interactive children’s exhibit on lichens for the annual California Lichen Society’s display at the San Francisco Mycological Society’s Fungus Fair is so popular that it is repeated annually and is also presented at the University of California, Berkeley’s Jepson Herbarium, annually on CALDAY open house. She enjoys exploring gardens with Naomi, her granddaughter, who delights in examining fl owers, lizards, birds, butterfl ies and dragonflies.