Garden Classrooms

Learning Gate Community School

One of the goals of Learning Gate Community School's Seed to Soup Organic Garden is to enrich academic instruction by integrating gardening throughout the curriculum. By tending the garden on a weekly basis, students from kindergarten through 8th grade are actively involved in the entire garden cycle, including: planning, opening, cultivating the soil, maintaining compost, planting and harvesting vegetables and herbs.

Potomack Intermediate School

Potomack Intermediate is located in a rural community with many of agricultural ties and careers in farming. Many of the teachers at Potomack Intermediate have background experience with Future Farmers of America, 4H, STEM garden based learning, and other agricultural education organizations. The goal of this school garden is to promote career based experiences and to connect curriculum instruction to the community and economy of the area. The garden will also help to increase hands on learning experiences, cross curricular instruction, and differentiated instruction.

Cypress Elementary

For many children, their experience with food is limited to that which comes from a can or a box. They have never seen a carrot growing in the dirt, watched lettuce sprout, or picked a pea from a vine. We want to change this at Cypress Elementary. We want our kiddos to get their fingers in the dirt! Our Healthy Lifestyles committee is planning a veggie/herb garden to complement the herb/butterfly garden we installed in the Spring.

Plymouth Creek Elementary School

Our garden was built in the spring of 2014 and has quickly become a focal point for our school. The 9 raised beds have provided unique hands-on learning activities for over 750 students and staff. It has become so popular that we have more demand than planting space! By expanding the garden, we can offer more learning opportunities to our school community. Greater space will also allow for a larger harvest so that we can donate surplus produce to a local food shelf, allowing students to experience the reward of helping those in need in our community.

Feldwood Elementary

The main goal of creating an “Outdoor Geo-Classroom” is to provide nature-related learning that develops observation and problem-solving skills, science and math abilities, imagination, creativity, and collaboration between students, teachers, and stakeholders ensuring lifelong learning and student achievement.

Moulton Elementary

Our goal is to implement an active garden that offers Upper Elementary a raised bed to grow plants to enhance their understanding of where food comes from and how it is grown. The teachers can extend classrooms and meet common core standards with hands on lessons in the garden. Worm bins, composting and rain barrels will be implemented to highlight the efficiency and sustainability of the environment. Students, staff and the community can enjoy the harvest and volunteer in the garden.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr. School Complex

The mission of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School Garden is to create a lifelong learning opportunity for our students; growing food, caring for it, and sharing surplus. This grant will help us increase student learning and improve teaching by extending the classroom to include the outdoors. Students will be active partners and key stakeholders in the intellectual, emotional, physical and social growth that comes from the maintenance of the garden.

St. Albans City School

We are in our third year of having students plant, tend, and harvest vegetables, herbs, and flowers from our gardens. Our few fruit trees are too small to bear fruit yet. All our students get to taste what they helped grow. The goal is to give our (basically urban) students an understanding of how foods make it to their tables and how tasty the food they grow can be.

Steiner Ranch Elementary

School gardens have resulted in improved dietary intake and related dietary behaviors, such as preferences, motivation, and self-efficacy to eat fruits and vegetables in children all over. Several studies have also shown that a school based gardening program enhances academic performances. Outdoor classrooms provide “hands on” experience of planting the seed, nurturing the growing of the plants, harvesting the produce, and in some cases preparing/cooking the produce. When children have the opportunity to use their hands they become active participants instead of passive learners.

Barnette Elementary School

The goal of Barnette's Buster Blossoms is to incorporate healthy, wellness and nutrition throughout the school and across all grade levels. We are hoping Buster's Blossoms will bring new partnerships from people throughout the community in growing, learning and eating produce provided by Buster's Community Garden. By teaching students the science behind vegetable growth and the wellness in making healthy choices and the philanthropy of sharing and doing good for the earth and community.

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