Pollinator Garden Challenge

Pollinator Garden Challenge

Where to Start:

Our class started this challenge when we signed up to do an action project with 'Learning for a Sustainable Future' for Climate Change. If you have not yet heard of this awesome website, do yourself a favour and sign up - as an educator, there are abundant resources and weekly newsletters that will compliment your outdoor education program. One of the webinars our class attended was about the decline of pollinators and their importance in ecosystems around the world. My class was immediately engaged in learning more about pollinators and how we could help them. We decided to dedicate some of our school's raised beds to pollinators and create some gardens for them.

Creating our Pollinator Garden:

We used a lot of math to plan our garden, which covered many expectations in measurement and number sense! First, we calculated the area of our raised beds (and volume, just for fun!) in order to figure out how many plants we could put in our garden.

Next, students broke up into groups to research perennial plants that we could plant to come up at different times of the growing period to provide flowers all the time for the pollinators and which plants attract particular pollinators. Students provided reasoning for each plant choice as well as the distance needed between plants so that we did not overcrowd them when planting.

We co-created a slideshow with all of our findings and then voted on which plants we would put in the garden. Using our funding, we purchased some bulbs to plant in the fall for spring blooming, and then we set aside funding to purchase summer plants that would provide flowers during the summer months.

Students measured, planted, and tended to our plants. We also purchased a bird bath to put in the garden. We also purchased a lilac bush that will provide shelter and flowers near the garden for pollinators to have a safe place to rest. We also planted a raised bed of sunflowers and a raised bed of 'weeds' that pollinators like, such as milkweeds.