To harvest our potatoes, I used a shovel to loosen the soil enough for the children to dig in with their bare hands. Gardening gloves can certainly come in handy, but I love getting the soil all over my own hands when in the garden so I share that experience with my students. Feel free to use the gloves! The children then just dug around until they felt they'd found all the potatoes. Some pulled out one, shouted in excitement, and were done for the day. Others sat around raking their fingers through the soil for the entire time the rest of the class was at recess.
We waited as long as we could to harvest to give the potatoes as much time to grow as possible. We dug them up the Friday before the last week of school. The plants had not yet flowered and the leaves weren't dead, but there wasn't any more time to wait. You can tell from the pictures that they could have stood to stay in the ground for much longer! The only thing that happens when you harvest too early is that the potatoes are smaller- in some cases MUCH smaller! We were still able to donate these potatoes to a local food pantry and I'm sure someone got a kick out of receiving tiny potatoes. If we'd had more I would have either made a potato dish in the classroom or let children take potatoes home. The potatoes we received were part of a service-learning project so they were destined for the food pantry from the beginning.
We pulled the potatoes out later that day during math. Oh, the possibilities! First, we counted the potatoes. We estimated how many there would be before counting and were all waaaaaay off! We ended up with 60 potatoes.
Next we sorted them by size. We decided to sort by small, medium, or large. Since they were not uniform in size, it was interested seeing the children decide which fit into each category.
After that I posed a question: Which size has the most potatoes? We discussed how we could determine this and decided to graph the potatoes. This is just a simple graph made by lining the potatoes up on the carpet (did I mention it was the Friday before the last week of school?!).
Another thing we did which I did not take picture of was to do a final journal entry of our findings. We'd done plenty of writing about the potatoes throughout the semester. One example is to predict how many potatoes they think are growing under the ground. Their incredibly low predictions crack me up- they were all shocked to find so many potatoes!
So there you have it, a few ideas to use to integrate gardening into your regularly scheduled math lessons. There are dozens upon dozens of other things to be done, of course, but did I mention it was the Friday before the last day of school? :)
