Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
The National Gardening Association website has a wealth of resources for managing a garden. Including regional reports:
For the middle-south, “With year’s hottest and driest weather just ahead, it is best to delay the planting of tress and shrubs until autumn, when the odds of successful establishment are more favorable.” – St. Claire, 2010
They also have some nice how-to videos and instructional pages on topics like planting tomatoes and starting vegetable seeds (for the plant sale).
A Tired Ball Speaks from THE AMEN PROJECT on Vimeo.
I remember playing the game with a rolled up spheroid of aluminum foil. For kids living in poverty in the developing world something as simple as a soccer ball is an expensive luxury. Jessica Hilltout has a coffee table book out called “Amen: Grassroots Football“, with photographs of the “balls” she’s seen used in Africa. The video above has just a small selection.
The pictures speak to, and help explain, the popularity of soccer around the world. Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure how to order the book, but the website does allow you to look inside.
To communicate an important or difficult message, it is important that your non-verbal communications, gestures, body language, align with the words you speak. Micheal Grinder who teaches courses on presentation skills and classroom management has a few good YouTube videos like the one above.
His blog is also a good resource.
Franz Lanting has a great storytelling voice and wonderful photographs that catalogue the history of life on Earth, from early organisms like stromatolites to the modern diverse forms of life (Lanting, 2007).
The St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank has started a video competition for college students to present economic information. The first competition was to explain opportunity costs.
The above video, on how to build a self-watering container (this type is also known as a Global Buckets), seems extremely useful for the urban gardener, especially in Memphis where even gardening in the ground is difficult because of the poor, loessic soil. I’ve found container gardening (in cat litter buckets) to be much more effective, even though evaporation is a major issue with our hot summers. So I very much like the idea of self-watering containers.
These containers may also be an excellent complement to our greenhouse, because we can avoid having to water every day. If we got the right containers, or decorated them nicely enough, we might be able to sell these with our vegetables at the end-of-year plant sale.
The related videos on YouTube have a variety of other self-watering container variants. This version, with water jugs and a single large tub, also seems like it might be effective. There are also nice instructional video on how siphons work, as an easier way of watering a series of buckets. The Global Buckets project is a fascinating effort to help reduce malnutrition with simple materials.
Child labor comes up when we talk about the industrial revolution. When we discuss its modern incarnations, we usually think about sweatshops in the developing world. Human Rights Watch has a poignant video about child labor in the United States today. Their interviews with migrant farmer children, who are the same age as our middle-schoolers, are heartbreaking.
Hydrogen is an alternative source of fuel (alternative to fossil fuels), but it can be produced from renewable or non-renewable sources. PBS and Scientific American Frontiers have a nice video on hydrogen fuel. They first visit a lab producing hydrogen fuel cells. The second part of the program visits Iceland is trying to use geothermal energy to create the hydrogen. They also discuss producing hydrogen from solar-electric and algae.