Previously published on September 28, 2022
SIOUX CITY — Third-grade students at Leeds Elementary got the opportunity to harvest vegetables from their garden Tuesday in preparation for their fall festival.
Students excitedly picked carrots, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and more. So far, the garden has produced more than 350 pounds of vegetables, which will be used to cook meals for their fall festival in November.
The Leeds garden has been operating for the last four years. Third-grade teacher Emily Mogensen has led the project after starting something similar at Unity Elementary.
“The kids have loved it ever since,” she said
Students at all grade levels help with the garden in different ways. Mogensen works with a master gardener to gather the seeds and necessary equipment for the garden.
Mogensen puts a call out to teachers who are interested in having their class plant seeds in the spring. The 13 to 15 classes will plant the seeds in a seed tray and teachers use the opportunity to teach counting skills, planting skills, and more.
The seeds will grow in a grow light system in Mogensen’s classroom, and kids take turns watering the plants and teachers will take time to bring their classes in to show the growing process.
“They see the process of their plants either growing or not growing,” she said.
The vegetables are planted outside and are cared for all summer. By the time school starts again in the fall, students can harvest.
The students have been harvesting the vegetables from the garden for the last few weeks. On Tuesday students harvested carrots for the first time, while also picking tomatoes, peppers, gourds, and potatoes.
David Clark and Avery Luck partnered together to pick vegetables, each time they found one, they were both excited.
“She had a lot of big ones and I had a lot of small ones,” Clark said. “I wonder who picked more.”
The garden teaches the students a variety of skills, and teachers use it as an opportunity to incorporate other K-12 learning standards such as a life cycle and counting and estimating.
“We make it educational and then teach a lifelong lesson,” she said. “They can (garden) all the way till the day you die.”
This year the students planted and grew birdhouse gourds. They will dry out the gourds and make instruments and painted birdhouses, Mogensen said.
The vegetables are cooked into a fall festival meal, allowing students to see what they can make with what they’ve grown.
Mogensen said each year they make different meals. They also try recipes from a variety of different cultures that some students may not have tried in the past.
On Tuesday, the Leeds students also released Monarch butterflies into the wild. The students have been studying the butterfly life cycle and tagged their butterflies to learn about the patterns of Monarchs.
View the full article by Caitlin Yamada on the Sioux City Journal’s website.