Outdoor Learning With Dr. Megan Zen

 

Outdoor Learning With Dr. Megan Zeni

By: CFE Team (Jillian, Megan & James)

Today, the CFE team took a field trip from our beloved Orchard Garden to learn from an expert in our community: Dr. Megan Zeni. Megan prepared a tour and conversation about outdoor learning environments around Tomekichi Homma Elementary. We saw rich, bursting garden beds created and tended with thoughtful care from staff, students, and the community alike. Enjoy this glimpse into our learning!

Gardens, Gazebos, and Genius Design

We began the visit with a recap of garden learning alongside another CFE group in the beautiful gazebo located in the Homma gardens. We discussed the many wonderful benefits gardens can bring to schools and communities.

A key takeaway? Gardens can be a strategy for supporting student behaviour and learning.

Here are some brilliant examples we saw:

• A garden box with a trellis that serves two purposes, plant growth AND a physical barrier that helps students preserve and protect the harvest

• The shoulder of apple trees that provide a fruitful harvest each fall, while also enclosing and protecting the garden and mud kitchen spaces

🌸 Shoulder of apple trees enclosing the gardens 🌸

Sights From the Garden: "Don't pick the radish or you will become badish."

The Homma school garden was very organized. Plants were arranged in clear boxes to help separate different groups. The signs were made by the students, which helped strengthen the school's (and students') connection to the garden itself.

They strategically placed plants and structures to direct student movement. For example:

Lavender was placed outside the gazebo to stop children from climbing on the benches.

This didn't just keep the plants safe; it also contributed to student learning and play. Genius!

Risky Play & Outdoor Learning

After the garden tour, we dove into discussions about risky play, including its merits, characteristics, and its place in a child's learning.

A Classroom Built With Intention

The learning space was evidence of careful planning, consideration, and clear learning objectives. The walls were decorated with natural materials, and a garden map is central to the space. Using seed packages as a visual strategy, the map allows students and teachers to:

• Optimize the use of the garden

• Properly care for the growth

• Harvest as it matures throughout the year

🗺️ Map of the garden using seed packages

Assessment of Learning

Megan extended our learning by showing us the outdoor classroom and garden model, featuring moments of learning captured through the eyes of the school community. Layered with learning from both last year and this year, you can form a deeper understanding of plants and how they exist in their environment.

The Three Cardinal Rules of Risky Play

The lecture on risky play covered the significance of this teaching strategy, a practice that is supported through the healthcare systems in British Columbia.

Here are the three cardinal rules (according to Megan):

Rule	What It Means
1. Relationship first	Having a relationship with the student and class is foundational to allow risky play to operate successfully and safely.
2. End on a high note	You should end risky play while it is going well – before it almost inevitably goes on too long and creates an opportunity for someone to get hurt.
3. One hazard at a time	There can only be ONE hazardous activity happening for ONE supervising teacher. More teachers mean more supervision and more risky play! (One teacher = one hazard at a time.Megan's lecture had nuggets of gold throughout the whole presentation – including the significance and value of heavy work for regulating dysregulated children.

Other important teachings include:

🧠 You cannot put a pencil in a student's hand before you assess how they sit in a chair or on the carpet.

🌱 Human and early development is essential to understanding the benefits of risky play.

📘 Use tools like the Richmond School District "Entry Routines" pamphlet to support this work.

🌐 Check out outsideplay.org for more resources.

🎮 Play cultures exist naturally at schools and are shared amongst grades in the schoolyard.

❤️ Why do we do risky play? It creates the conditions where children want to come to school.

🎯 Command games are great tools for practicing classroom management and listening as a class.

⚠️ Risky play only shows up in unstructured free play.

👧 Risks are hazards based on the developmental abilities of each individual child. This is why relationships are foundational!

The Big Takeaway

The overall goal of risky play is to microdose children with feelings of discomfort to build internal resilience and strength that will benefit them for life.

The reflections from this wonderful learning, which took place both outdoors and in the classroom, could stretch long beyond the length of a blog.

In summary: Dr. Megan Zeni is a genius at risky play!

Thanks for reading, and go get your hands dirty (safely)! 🌿

Breathing New Life into Branches, Stems and Vines

The Fruit Tree Grafting Workshop by Dr. Julia Palm-Sinclair

This morning, Julia hosted a fantastic workshop on grafting. It’s clear they know their stuff when it comes to gardening, especially after they showed us a map of their father’s orchard, which features an incredible variety of fruit trees.

Julia demonstrating how to cut a branch

Basic knowledge of grafting is a must for anyone who owns an orchard. Attaching different rootstocks to trees offers massive benefits, enabling them to adapt to environments where they wouldn't normally thrive. In addition, grafting helps control a tree's size. When you successfully connect two different plant tissues, you create what's known as a chimera.

There are several ways to graft, and today Julia demonstrated two techniques (see the pictures below):

Basic Cleft (or V-graft) 

Whip & Tongue graft / Splice graft

 

Making Use of Blackberry Vines

In the afternoon, Susan taught us how to harvest and use blackberry vines. To harvest these vines, first find a large blackberry vine that does not have flowers. The first step is to remove its branches with clippers. Next, carefully remove the spikes on the vine by pushing them to the side. Looking down into the cut vine, you will see a pentagonal shape. Using this shape as a guide, carefully peel the sides of the vine like a banana. Finally, lay out these pieces to dry; once dried, they can be woven into rope. As for the leaves, they can be dried to make tea. What a useful plant!

 

  

Lu cutting a new blackberry vine 

 

Blackberry leaves 

Blackberry skin

 

This type of blackberry that’s commonly seen in BC is called Himalayan blackberry or European blackberry. According to the Invasive Species Council of BC, this plant can crowd out low-growing vegetation and limit the movement of large animals. Himalayan blackberry is designated as a Regional Containment/Control species by the BC Provincial Priority Invasive Species List.

 

Turning Morning Glory Vines Into Beautiful Wreaths

Our team also made several wreaths out of morning glory vines which can be found throughout the garden. We hope the children coming to our workshop absolutely fall in love with them! Take a look at these masterpieces:

 

Wreaths for angels  

Other IMPORTANT Work Today

A group of very green-thumbed UBC planters did an excellent job of planting a nice variety of flowers and plants in a newly created garden bed. It looks fantastic and we are all excited to see it grow:

 

Some of are team's artists did a great job painting this wonderful sign that will help guide all in the garden:

By: Lu and Keegan

Noticing Little Things - Questioning Big Things

Talking Garden

After giving the garden her morning drink, we settled down for a chat about gardens, the outdoors, and the practical questions we as teachers need to think about when bringing our classroom to the outside. 

Susan gave us two great questions to spark our discussions. 

1. Why teach the curriculum outside?

2. How does classroom management look when you take kids outside?

Below is a word cloud with some common answers we had.

Overall teaching outdoors, be it in a garden or forest, provides students an opportunity to move, practice hands on learning, and connect to the wider world they live in. As teachers we can find ways to interweave BC curriculum into the outdoors: Math (patterns. fibonacci), Socials (local Indigenous history), ELA (poetry walks), Science (Ecosystems, life cycles, etc.). These are just a few ways BC Curriculum can be applied to the outdoor setting. The outdoor setting also provides many opportunities for learning life skills such as, assessing risk, using tools, communication, and respecting environment.

Our discussions about classroom management in an outdoor setting focused on the following points: 

• Establish clear boundaries using highly visible markers such as cones, bunting, or brightly coloured fabric (e.g., scarves). 

• Develop a consistent outdoor learning routine so that behavioural expectations are clear and predictable. For example, a whistle signal can be used to gain students' attention, while designated learning areas can be clearly marked with cones. 

• Expectations should be explicitly taught before going outside and reinforced once students are in the outdoor learning space. 

• Remember that outdoor learning does not always need to involve direct instruction. Meaningful learning can also occur through exploration, play, and discovery. 

• When appropriate, and once required tasks are completed, allow students opportunities for free movement and active play to support engagement and wellbeing.

Art in the Garden

Mandela

Next, we were introduced to the practice of ephemeral land-based artmaking by creating mandalas from foraged and naturally fallen materials. These artworks are temporary, site specific and are often shaped by natural processes such as weather, erosion, and seasonal change. Below are some of our mandalas.

 

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Tiny Photography

For our final activity this morning, we took close-up photographs of natural subjects and explored how framing and perspective influences meaning. Susan encouraged us to look up close at various subjects like a blade of grass or a section of a path and also to move our body in a different way or lie down and look up. This helped us consider how different viewpoints can change interpretation, and pay attention to what is included and excluded from an image. 

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Work Party!!!!

Giving the Garden a Manicure

Keegan and Lu continued their hard work on the garden paths today. They widened them and added re-wood chipping the old paths. Katie and I (Alex) also began trimming the birch tree to free up some space by the benches. 

                                                            

Connecting to yesterday’s explorations of manicured vs decolonized gardens, brought up the question of where we should intervene and where to leave be. Do we dig an inch or two to the side of the pathways? Or do those plants serve a purpose and are best left alone? Is it right to trim the branches off the tree? How much would be too much? What is the balance we are wanting to strike?

A Battle for Glory: Tedious task turned joyful. 

Our battle against the morning glory (Bindweed) continued today. We started gathering more of the weed from some of the garden's trees and green spaces. Then many of us took a break from the afternoon sun underneath the tent to prepare the bindweed for drying. This acted as a moment of community building, as while the morning glory kept our hands busy, we were able to chat, unpack our practicums, and some of the burdens and bright spots of the program so far. 

    

As a teacher, I found myself considering how we go about creating community in the classroom. So often I feel like it is reduced to icebreakers, but it is in the continuous small moments that bring people together. What routines can we build into our classrooms? What moments of spontaneity do we allow to flourish, then cultivate?

Reclamation of the Chives (and Rosemary)

In weeks past, a chive bandit had made away with all the garden’s chives; however, after digging past the buttercups, we discovered some chives! We harvested them and are beginning to cut back the buttercups so the remaining chives can hopefully start thriving. 

We are still debating whether to cut down the buttercups or dig out the roots as well, and risk potentially damaging the remaining chives. To be continued… 

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A rosemary bush was also reclaimed today. Hiding behind a flourishing lemon balm and being choked by the ever-grasping morning glory, the rosemary bush was thriving. With some hard work, it became visible to the rest of the garden.

Today’s Harvest

• Chives
• Some raspberries that were quickly eaten
• Lemon balm cuttings for future tea making
• Lemon balm plant