April showers bring May flowers.
With Spring underway, and flowers blooming everywhere, there is a new opportunity to sharpen your students' math skills. Using gardens to teach math makes the topic more engaging to kids and provides unique opportunities to show them how processes work. It teaches problem solving, measurements, geometry, data gathering, counting and percentages and many more aspects. Teaching math with gardening gives kids hands-on interactions with the theories and provides them with a fun experience they will remember.
The simple ability to count as children decide how many rows to plant, or how many seeds to sow in each area, are life-long lessons they will carry into adulthood. Math garden activities, such as measuring the area for a plot or collecting data regarding the growth of vegetables, will become day to day needs as they mature.
Using gardens to teach math allows students to immerse themselves in these concepts as they pursue the development and growth of the garden. They will learn about area as they graph out the plot, planning how many plants they can grow, how far apart they need to be and measure distance for each variety. Basic geometry will prove useful as children contemplate shapes and the design of the garden.
Here are some math skills that can be sharpened through gardening:
