WOODRIDGE, Illinois—Nurturing diverse learners is the goal at Goodrich School, where more than 400 elementary students speak some 41 languages. Fourth-grade teacher Denise Trabilsy sees herself as a "guide on the side," engaging her students in solving real-life problems.

Recently, for instance, the teacher challenged her students to design a garden plot. To give the project a dose of reality, she played the role of customer and students worked in pairs as garden contractors. Their task: design a plot to match the customer's specs and preferences.

Trabilsy helped jump-start her young designers' imaginations by reading them a story about building a city garden. Then she laid out the particulars. She explains: "I told them the garden needed to be freestanding (so that it can be seen from all four sides), 12 feet by 12 feet, and planted with annuals only. The garden bed would be in full sun, except for three hours in the morning when it's not very hot."

That wasn't all. Students were also told some of the things their teacher loves in a garden: "bright colors, butterflies, hummingbirds, and flowers to cut and bring inside."

With those specifications in mind, students headed to the Internet to dig up facts about local weather, annual flowers, flowers suitable for cutting, and flowers that attract birds and butterflies. They downloaded pictures of flowers, along with information on how tall plants might grow and how closely together they can be planted.

In this suburban school located about 25 miles southeast of Chicago, only about 40 percent of students have access to computers at home. However, they have ample opportunities at school to become proficient at using technology. Each classroom has four or five computers, and the school computer lab has another 30. A set of portable keyboards has been ordered, too, to make word processing more accessible throughout the school. In addition, there are digital cameras, digital movie cameras, a large-screen projector, scanners, and other equipment available for teachers to use in their classrooms.

Once students finished using the Internet to gather information about plants, Trabilsy showed them examples of garden plans drawn by professionals. Then she turned them loose in pairs to draw their designs on a 12-inch-square grid. "They had to calculate to make sure they had the right amount of plants in the garden. Not enough would make it look sparse, and too many would result in the plants not growing properly," the teacher explains.

For the final step, students used publishing software to create brochures about their "design company." They talked as a class about information that belongs in a brochure, as well as concepts relating to graphic design quality. "Then the teams were off and running," Trabilsy says. "They made beautiful and informative brochures about their design companies to entice their customers. The software helped show students that their work can look very professional when they pay attention to design quality."

Finally, Trabilsy and her husband sat down with the students' garden plot designs and promotional brochures and made first-, second-, and third-place selections. Winning team members received garden-related prizes.

The teacher was delighted with the effort students put into the project. "When given a real-life problem to solve, students met the challenge and went beyond my expectations," she says. "The only down side," she adds, "is that I didn't have a plot of land to make any of these gardens. That would have been a great way to culminate the lesson."