A garden journal can be a useful tool in the classroom garden.  A journal can be a way to collect data, record changes, and note student observations.  It can help students demonstrate what they have learned or express creatively how a gardening experience made them feel.  With your classroom teacher's input, decide what type of journal would best suit your students and their needs. 

Things to consider: 

• Will each student create a journal, will groups work as a team to create one, or will students add pages to a class journal?
• What will the cover be?  Consider a 3-ring binder, pocket folder, or hand-made cover. 
• Will all or some of the pages be blank or would an observation form (see attached) be better?
• Open-ended entries can be pictures or sentences expressing what they observed, experienced, or learned.
• Structured entries can meet specific criteria you set.

Show your class that the journal has value by consistently recording in it and referencing it. 

• Record weather, temperature, wind, season, time, date, seasonal changes.
• Listen.  What do you hear both near and far?
• Record general changes to the garden.
• Record specific plant changes.
• Look for birds, insects, and other creatures.  What did they look like?  What were they doing?
• What did you do today?  What did you learn?
• Have each student adopt a “special spot.”  Observe, sketch, and note how the spot changes over time.
• Look from an ant's point of view.  Lie down and see the world as an ant would see it.  How big would a blade of grass seem?  Where would you hide if a lawn mower or predator came?
• Responses to literature.