Garden Classrooms

Charles Hart Middle School

Hart Middle School is located in Ward 8 in Washington, DC, the poorest ward in the nation's capital, and in a community where fresh food is scarce and rarely an option. The school has also struggled with both attendance and testing scores. With this new garden initiative, we aim to better engage students in school classes and activities related to the garden and provide them with a hands-on learning experience, particularly for our special education and autistic classes.

Northeast Elementary School

Northeast Elementary School has a unique opportunity to encourage and educate both children and their families in promoting healthy eating habits, thereby reducing the rate of obesity and overweight children. Nutritional education and wellness activities will be incorporated into interactive and fun classroom and after school programs. These might include cooking classes, where children learn to make smoothies, soups and simple meals. Additionally, exercise clubs will be incorporated into before, during and after school programs.

Syringa Mountain School

The Syringa Mountain School aims to showcase a community and student empowered garden space. The gardens serve as a learning lab for students, parents, and staff alike. Unique to the school's experiential curriculum is vegetable and herb propagation, seed saving, food preservation, medicine making, composting, plant identification and other practical skills. Central to the gardens are bio-dynamically prepared composts and teas that enhance soil life.

Vanscoy

Over the past 2 years Vanscoy School, a rural school just outside of the city of Saskatoon, has been creating an outdoor classroom to be used by all classes at the school from Kindergarten to grade 8. The space was designed to be fully accessible to all members of the community, but is especially used during outdoor education classes which all students at the school participate in. After completion, the outdoor classroom will feature a covered learning space, green areas for learning and working together, and raised beds for planting vegetables and fruit.

Elkins Primary School

Our goal it to help students to form a connection with their food by understanding where it comes from and to promote a love for healthy snack options. We live in an area that is somewhat inundated with fast food, and there are also many kids on the free and reduced lunch program who may not have adequate access to a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables. We hope to encourage a love for healthy food and to build a foundation for healthy food choices later in life.

South Dade Senior High

South Dade Senior High has a 62 year old agricultural education program and functioning agricultural row crop facility that encompasses approximately 8 acres. It is the program's goal to every year produce vegetables during the winter season that are distributed through our school's farmer's market, and that are also distributed regionally and nationally through local distributors.

Memorial Middle School

Our entire school garden is utilized as an educational tool. The garden is used directly with the Family and Consumer Sciences classes and serves 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students at Memorial Middle School. Produce used in the Family and Consumer Sciences (FACS) classrooms allow students to learn to prepare vegetables, the importance of nutrition, and how their food choices will affect their health.

Prichard Elementary

The goal of our garden is to provide an interactive learning experience for our students. We would like to expand our current garden to include a green house and learning lab. This would provide our students with year round learning experiences. Our current garden is small, but the students have thoroughly enjoyed participating in the planting and harvesting of the crops. With a larger garden, we would be able to provide more fruits and vegetables for our students to sample and take home. Our county will also allow us to use the harvest in the cafeteria.

Frankford Friends School

Many of today’s children, especially city-dwelling students like ours, are no longer able to spend unhurried hours exploring the natural world in the way that previous generations enjoyed. Yet, research is showing that nature play and exploration make essential contributions to children’s cognitive, emotional, social, and physical development. Natural “playscapes” like the one planned at Frankford Friends School are rich outdoor spaces, designed based on research and field-tested principles, where children can connect to nature in curiosity-driven, unhurried play and exploration.

Bellevue Santa Fe Charter School

Goals:
The goal of the Bellevue Santa Fe Charter School garden is to provide an area of our school that kids have an opportunity to extend their education in all subjects as well as work on life skills such as patience, cooperation and teamwork. The garden is also a place for our school community to learn about the environment and our impact as well as developing a palate for nutritionally dense foods. We are working towards creating a self sustaining food forest that will not only feed the students lunch, but their families dinner, as well.

Pages