Hi, everybody !
I read about windowfarming less than two months ago and build two prototypes of my own.
I’m a teacher in province of Quebec, Canada, and soon wanted to experience this with my students.
But I’m a little shy to join your group, because I teach to intellectually handicapped children, so my reality seems very different from the one I perceive from your exchanges…
But after all, teaching is teaching, so I’m diving in today.
Here’s what I did so far : I decided to submit my project to a provincial educational program called Young entrepreneurs. My class should earn a 300$ grant for this.
Two years ago, I initiated in my school a project with worm composting. I helped my students build a ”house” for the worms, since they could understand that a living being may seek a place to live in.
My students are very slow learners, but now it’s clear for them that those little critters are always hungry and that we can feed them with our leftovers. They perceive them as pets and feel some responsability for them.
As we also have a few plants in the class (mainly pelargoniums), they helped many times to feed them with the ”pooh juice” from our worms.
This year, we have a lot of worm compost and it’s too much for our plants. Hence the idea of acquiring more plants to make good use of all this manure. My students usually manifesting a sustained interest for food, it was not difficult to convince them to cultivate edible plants and they chose the plants they wanted to seed with the help of a pictographic list.
So, the next step is to build the thing.
They composed four simple sentences made of pictograms :
Alexandre – is constructing – a house – for plants.
Alexandre – wants – empty – plastic bottles.
Friends – give to – Alexandre – plastic bottles.
Alexandre – says – thank you.
Then, they chose a teacher each and went to visit his or her class to present their request to them.
The experience was great, because from the start, they were very enthousiastic with this project, and the school’s students and teachers reacted very positively to our project.
This Friday, we are supposed to go back in the classes to collect all the plastic bottles the students will be willing to give us.
With the exceeding bottles, we’ll raise funds to buy the seeds.
My students already cleaned the hydroton pellets in lukewarm water and are eager to go on with this exciting now adventure.
Thanks to windowfarms, I hope to make them realize gradually the whole cycle of food recycling.
I dream of the day when Alexandre will pick up the small cherry he cultivated inside his own portion of the farm, sink his teeth in it and then toss its hull into the worm bin to close the cycle…

Everyone listen to Janet below! Enter the Windowfarm Curriculum contest! There are 4 categories: Home School, Grammar School, Middle School, and High School, so you all should have a place to enter! http://www.windowfarms.org/classrooms