Garden Classrooms

Cameron Public School

If Cameron Public School were to receive this grant, administrators, teaching staff and support staff will be able to provide students multiple, meaningful learning opportunities. From planning to harvesting, students will be engaged and involved in the entire process. Our goal is to create a natural learning environment for our youngest learners in our school. We want to foster healthy eating habits as early as possible so that children that come through our school will leave with a strong belief that healthy eating isn't a choice but a necessary lifestyle required to be successful.

Daniel Jenkins Creative Learning Center

We have been building up our garden for the past 3 years. We have a green house and an out door classroom. We have also received tools, 3 additional raised beds and seeds by taking a school gardening class over the summer. One problem, but goal, we have is irrigation. We had hoses that were lined up across the driveway and through a field to get to the 7 raised beds we have. We even have a timer to water the plants, but the lawn services company rides over our hoses and cuts them. This makes irrigation very difficult. Another goal is to become GAP certified.

John F. Kennedy High School

The goal of this garden is to teach students about healthy eating and natural food options. There is a Health and Wellness afterschool program that will utilize the garden as a component of fitness and nutrition. One Hundred Eighty Degrees is a program on campus that focuses on social and emotional development. This class will use the garden for team building exercises. The Hmong Leadership program will benefit from the garden because the community is devoid of farming and gardening, which is a cultural staple.

Word & Praise Christian Learning Center

Our ultimate goal for our future school garden is to afford our students with an experience that they otherwise would never have had. We want our students to learn the science of gardening, we want them to experience the empowerment that comes along with growing and eating their own food, and we want them to expand their ideas of what “good tasting” food can be. We would like to provide access to different vegetables that many of our students have never tasted or seen due to the limited food access in our community.

Bridport Central School

Our goal is to use the Whole Kids Grant to expand our current garden from 5 small raised beds (3x6 ft each) to an area equivalent of 150x150 feet or, just less than one-half acre and to create a three-bin composting to begin preparing Bridport Central School for Vermont’s Universal Recycling Law, Act 148, which will ban all organic materials from landfills by 2020. Next spring, the Garden Team plans to install a 3-bin compost system and small, secure outdoor tool shed.

Bailey Gatzert Elementary

The Danny Woo Children's Garden Program, run by InterIm CDA, provides Bailey Gatzert Elementary School students classes both at the school and field trips to our unique garden, the Danny Woo Community Garden. The Danny Woo Community Garden is a place where low-income gardeners raise vegetables that reflect their cultural foods of choice, and children come to learn about these cultural and environmental connections. Our curriculum follows a seed- to- plate model; where youth and young children learn how to grow, prepare, cook, and eat healthy foods.

Monarch Learning Academy

An edible garden grant will allow our students to access nutritious produce during snack time, investigate where their food comes from, taste nutritious recipes, and pay it forward to two "adopted" low income families and our local food bank. The school garden will serve as an outdoor classroom where teachers apply lessons alongside the planning, planting, cultivation, and harvesting processes. We plan to use our edible garden to teach others how they too can grow their own vegetables and herbs through a blog.

Charlotte Avenue Elementary

We hope to create an inclusive community of involved gardeners including students, teachers, parents, and neighbors that will support and sustain a garden in years to come at the Charlotte Ave School. It would be the first garden in the Nashua school system. We envision a raised bed garden filled with herbs, vegetables, and edible flowers that will replace the monoculture lawn. Children will be able to smell mint and cilantro, watch the tomatoes bud, flowers grow, and pull fresh carrots right out of the ground.

Washington Elementary School

Our gardens goal is to raise edible vegetables and herbs. In the process we are educating our students on the process of how food begins as a seed, grows, and ends up in the grocery store. We want our students to know that food can be grown locally and not just boxed or canned and in the grocery store. We are teaching them about the work that goes into raising a garden such as weeding, planting, watering. We want to teach them healthy habits such as eating fresh organic vegetables and herbs.

Gledhill Junior Public School

The Gledhill school vegetable garden is maintained by parents and school staff. Last year the garden, located in the common area at the rear of the school, was used by about forty students in two classrooms. Gledhill staff, with support from the Gledhill School Council, are looking to grow student involvement annually.

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