The Magic of a High-Five
Leila Skinner, Youth Education Coordinator
We are back in the school gardens and enjoying the last bit of warm weather to the fullest before heading into the cooler season. With the magic of being outside, we get to experience all the little joys that come from learning with and around amazing creatures that live right in the garden classrooms.
Along with amazing harvests from their garden classrooms, CitySprouts garden educators also always have incredible stories to tell from their days at the schools.
Gardener Hazel works at MLK on Fridays
Every Friday, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School’s rooftop garden is a soundscape of seven year olds giggling and exclaiming as they race to be the first one to point out that the butternut squash has grown to be larger than their heads. The rooftop garden at the MLK School is the first intentionally designed learning garden to be included in Cambridge Public Schools! The space includes raised beds, compost bins, kid-sized tools, outdoor tables for plant observation and other activities like beet-printing, as well as solar panels above the garden that offer shade to the young gardeners and solar energy to the school. The rooftop garden also has a digging bed, sensory bed, various kinds of vegetables, pollinators, and delicious herbs - if you’re a member of the school community, we welcome you to come by and see for yourself or have your student give you a tour!
The MLK garden is a place for learning - even if it means about the potentially scarier parts of life and our planet! Along with the magic of ripening of tomatoes and sprouting seedlings that students planted, gardens are also home to other curiosities including many wriggly worms, roly-poly’s, and the source of much fear for young friends: bees. Bees are hard at work in the garden pollinating the marigolds, zinnias, and flowers of the squash plants and even can be found napping tucked within the flowers of our pollinator garden. On a recent Friday, for a class of second graders, the potential threat of bees flying close to them launched them into screams and chaos as they rushed away from the garden beds with bees. Though we tried to calmly explain that the bee was more afraid of humans than we were of it, the class quickly fell into fear as students went from calmly harvesting, to following their peers as they rushed away from the garden beds.
Luckily, Gardener Hazel (or “Gardener Basil” as she’s fondly known by students) who is the garden educator at the MLK School, had a trick up her sleeve. As students abruptly abandoned their previous activities, Gardener Hazel regained their attention with two blows of her wooden train whistle “choo-choo” causing all the students to pause what they were doing and turn their attention to her. She calmly said “I have something to show you.” Bolstered by their curiosity and trust in Hazel, students gathered around the previously fear-ridden garden bed to watch.
As a bee was gathering nectar, Hazel gently and respectfully extended her pointer finger near one of the bee’s legs, “this is how you give a bee a high five,” as the bee lifted up one of its legs to tap Hazel’s finger.
Absolutely transfixed, the second graders watched as the previous foe of the bee became a friend that could offer up high-fives, one of their common greetings to friends, teachers, and other adults. After a moment of silence as students processed what they had just learned, calls of
“I want to try! Show me how to Gardener Hazel!”
Gardener Hazel had transformed the class from a place of chaos to a place of empowerment. Now, brave second graders with the supervision of their garden educator could try their hand (literally) at befriending a bee and giving them a high-five.
As we came back next week, second graders were feeling confident and even showing their peers who hadn’t been there last week how to high-five some of the local garden inhabitants. Though this Friday’s class had gone from a lesson on harvesting tomatillos to bee etiquette, the second graders seemed to have learned a deeper sense of appreciation and respect for the creatures found in their school garden and in the greater natural world.
CitySprouts is proud to make possible these opportunities for moments of wonder and exploration to be in support of planting Native plants to support our Native bee population. Learn more here about how you can help our local pollinators in your garden and beyond!