Designing Gardens
During the fall semester, with the 1st grade class at the Michael R. White School, we took advantage of our proximity to the Cleveland Cultural Gardens to explore how landscape designers shape our experience of the natural world in conjunction with students’ learning about the basic needs of living things, including plants.
First, students used clay to create their own dishes for miniature gardens. While these were drying to be fired, we took a field trip to the Cultural Gardens, where students used pencil and paper to draw maps and record their observations about what features they noticed in the gardens.
Following this field trip, students applied their observations to designing their own gardens, creating maquettes, or miniature models, using real plants. We recalled how the designer of the Cultural Gardens had created paths for visitors to walk through and included lots of variety within the gardens to capture visitors’ interest. Variety is an important principle of effective design, and students were able to explore many different ways of using variety in this project through the varied textures, colors, and forms of the plants and sculptures they included in their own gardens.
To top everything off, students got to see a laser cutter in action as signposts were etched using each child’s handwriting, so that everyone who visited our mini gardens would know whose was whose!
