Garden Classrooms

Most Blessed Trinity Academy

This school garden’s mission is to educate children, families and the community about healthy eating, food sourcing, community service, and the joy of growing your own food. Most Blessed Trinity Academy and Youth Conservation Corps consider it important for youth to learn about the importance of what they eat. We have found hands-on learning to be very effective, and kids living in urban areas often have few opportunities to really get their hands dirty. We want to teach them about nutrition while simultaneously showing them that they have the power to grow what they eat.

The Academy Charter School

Built in 2013, The Academy’s Aquaponics Garden consists of four raised wooden beds filled with hydroponic grow rocks and connected to a pond filled with Koi. The overall goal is to teach healthy eating habits to students while showing them how to sustain themselves through nature. The garden grows vegetables with the produce given to students and available for them to take home to their families. Garden projects have also become part of the school curriculum within multiple classes.

Edwin A. Alderman

Alderman Elementary is transitioning towards a Medical, Health, & Wellness focus. As part of the "wellness" component, we would like to develop and implement a school garden. This garden will help us reach several goals. Our main goal is to educate our students on healthy food choices and to instill within them and their families healthy eating habits. Research shows that children who grow their own food are more likely to eat fresh fruits and vegetables (Hermann et al., 2006). Our second goal is to promote cultivating environmental stewardship.

Burns Latino Studies Academy

Summer of Solutions Hartford is a youth leadership development and food justice program based in Frog Hollow, Hartford. We built a school garden at the Burns Latino Studies Academy, our local community school, in 2012.
Over the past three years, we have worked with teachers and students to care for the garden and harvest the produce. We worked with teachers to write activities in the garden which complemented what their students were learning in the classroom. Each year, we work with 10 classrooms for at least four sessions.

Sugarland Elementary

Sugarland's Inside Out Garden is a powerful educational and environmental tool. Through gardening, our students have an opportunity to develop a greater understanding of the natural world. It provides our impoverished students their first opportunity to dig into dirt and watch plants grow. In addition, the garden provides broader life lessons including contributing to students' knowledge of how to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Because Louisiana is experiencing an epidemic of child obesity and weight-related diseases, the need for prevention education is critical.

Sparkman Junior High

Our goal with this grant for our garden is to plant, care for, harvest and serve fresh wholesome foods for our student's and community. Our student's in each grade k through 8 will adopt an area or planter box in which to plant a selected seed. We as a school are very excited in the opportunity to create and actually eat a food that we have grown. We plan on growing a large enough crop so that our student's can harvest and share part of this crop with their families. This project will be a huge lesson in caring for our community and giving back to them.

Mountain View Elementary

Our goal is to create a garden space where displaced and low resource families can have grow boxes, elementary school students can have outdoor science opportunities, community learning center clients can have a quiet moment, and the entire community can come together in an inviting space in a low resource inner city neighborhood. 90% of Mountain View's 649 students are low resource, 58% are English language learners and 31 native languages are represented in the school population. 86% of the children are 'minority' making this a minority majority school.

Minnie Hughes Elementary School

Here at Minnie Hughes, we plan to use our garden for teaching and experimenting purposes. Our students come from a very low income area, and healthy foods and gardens are rare. We would like to use our school garden to meet the needs for some of our Science standards, as well as allowing students to try different foods, and be proud of what they have grown.

Barringer Academic Center

The proposed garden is a critical teaching tool, designed to mitigate the diet-related issues faced by children in Barringer Academic Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. The vision of this garden is to revitalize the concept of a kitchen garden. Historically, kitchen gardens allowed families to achieve economic independence and household security, which is crucial for this community. This garden will allow children to have regular access to real food which they will be more likely to consume since they were integral to the growing process.

Old Post Road

Our goal is to help kids realize the importance and benefits making healthy choices and keeping fit. Our garden supports the goal by allowing students to have a hands on learning experience and be active participants. Our teachers are able to use the garden as a way to learn as it supports our science, math and health curriculum with activities they can do in the garden. We also want the gardening project to be part of our larger community We are currently involving our local seniors and students from our local agricultural school with the garden along with our students.

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