Gardening for Homonyms: Integrating Science and Language Arts to Support Children's Creative Use of Multiple Meaning Words

Curriculum integration can increase the presence of science at the elementary level. The purpose of this article is to share how two second-grade teachers have integrated language arts content as a part of science-language arts instruction in a garden-based learning context. One application was a teacher-designed Gardening for Homonyms lesson, which supported new ways of thinking about words and wordplay while developing science vocabulary related to structure and function, diversity of life, and interdependent relationships in ecosystems. This article provides the lesson and discusses its implementation in two second-grade classrooms. Examples of student work illustrate children's creative thought around and application of multiple meaning words. Pre-, post-, and extended posttest measures of students' ability to generate and to use homonyms demonstrate that this science-language arts integrated lesson can result in both short- and long-term learning. Applications and follow-up from the lesson over two subsequent years have engaged second and third grade students in study/inquiry about plant growth and life cycles while utilizing many facets of language arts, which have ranged from labeling an experimental design and writing predictions and results to conversing about digital “GigaPan” images on growing strawberries.