OL 303 Assignment Eight Homework
Online Learning: OL 303 Vegetable Gardens & Community Gardens for Family Nutrition & Food Security
https://csd-i.org/vegetable-gardens-community-gardens-food/

This week’s resources:
Assignment Eight Discussion
CSDi Development Community & the Family Food Security Group
Magee Example Project Assignment Eight
Your lesson plan and how to card

Assignment Eight: Garden Bed Planting Workshop
Part one. Checklist
The first thing to do for your workshop is to make sure that your well-prepared: That you have people to meet with, you have a place to hold a workshop, and you have the materials that you will need.

You should consider making a few simple posters for the early part of the workshop. You could simply take the how to card from the download class documents page, and copy the house and garden plan, the organic material drawing, the digging chart, onto large sheets of newsprint. You might also want to do a simple drawing showing how you want to site your garden beds so that it gets sufficient sun and isn’t located where it will be overly exposed to wind. I’ve also do another very simple drawing showing an example of how to space seeds (specifically the seeds that you will be planting) on the garden bed.

Hopefully you the agriculturalist will be able to help you.

If you’ve decided to offer nutritious snacks or nutritious luncheon, you have chosen recipes and have a plan for purchasing the food and getting volunteer help to prepare it. You also have cups or glasses, tea and water, plates and cutlery, napkins, and a way to clean up at the end.

You might want to see if the volunteers from the last workshop are available to prepare and serve the luncheon – so that you can focus on leading the workshop.

The nutritious luncheon is not only a good demonstration of the whole concept of what you’re trying to do here, but it is a good way to track people to a workshop.

Your workshop is ready to go.

Good luck!

Part two.
The lesson plan that you wrote for leading the workshop will be very helpful in both the preparation in advance (because it lists materials that you will need) but it also tells you what to do at each stage of the workshop so that you can stay on track.

Take notes throughout the day right onto the lesson plan to remind you about things that went well, things that didn’t go well, and how long the different segments took. For example you might find that the workshop only took six hours to do rather than eight hours you estimated.

Large sheets of paper and markers are also a great way to take notes. As your community members say interesting things you can jot them down on his large sheets of paper and use them later as reminders of what was said, what people’s reactions were, and what was and wasn’t working.

I know that you will be tired at the end of the day but I would take a few minutes when you get home to go through the lesson plan and make a few more notes. The next time you give this workshop or when one of your colleagues wants to give this workshop you can clean up the lesson plan to reflect what really happened. Even a year from now your notes will be very useful.

I would also recommend meeting with your team the next day to get their perceptions of how the workshop went and if any improvements could be made the next time that you give it.

Be sure to take photographs. You should get your volunteer helpers to take photographs of you as well. Be sure to take some close-up detailed shots of some of the participants, be sure to take close-up detailed shots of the materials that you use — including interesting drawings that you might have done in your large sheets of paper, be sure to take shots of the whole group, and if you offer nutritious snacks please be sure to take photographs of that and of people enjoying the snacks.

This time, you should also ask people to smile so that you can have some compelling photographs for presentations and future proposals. Consider a quick read of “capturing compelling photos”:
https://nonprofit.csd-i.org/field-guide-capturing-compelling-photos-from-the-field/

These photographs will also come in very handy when it comes time to give a PowerPoint presentation to a group about what you’re doing, or for training future people to give the same workshop.

Good luck and enjoy yourself.

The homework to turn in will be:
1. A short summary of how the workshop went and how it was received by the community members.
2. A short paragraph on what worked well and also of things that you might do differently next time.
3. A few photographs of the workshop.

Go to Magee’s Example Project Assignment Eight to see what this could look like.

See you next week.