Garden Classrooms

The goals of our school garden are to give our scholars a sense of where food comes from and how much effort it takes to produce quality food, to inspire a passion for gardening, and create greater sustainability in the urban context. At Hiawatha Academy, we believe in the importance of providing scholars real time and hands-on opportunities to connect their experiences to curriculum in the classroom.

While establishing our garden this year as a staff, we set the expectations to work collaboratively to grow vegetables organically, sharing the bounty with staff, students, parents, and the community. We had a successful year in caring for the garden, sharing the responsibilities with the student environmental club (ICE). The shared food with the staff usually came back in a dish that was then shared with the staff. Students were able to bring vegetables home and parents were welcomed to come and pick their own vegetables when picking up their children.

The goal of the garden is to involve students, school staff, families and community members in growing, maintaining and harvesting vegetables and fruits. The garden will educate these groups about gardening techniques, which they can duplicate at home or in community gardens. The garden will introduce these groups to the health benefits of gardening as a source of fresh vegetables and fruit, financial benefits through lower food costs, healthy physical activity and improved nutrition.

Our goal is to achieve a sustainable growing space which will serve as both a demonstration of gardening principles as well as a living laboratory to carryout investigations. Another goal would be to harvest food which would make its way to our school lunch salad bar and may be donated to our local food bank. In order to accomplish this goal, we have developed curriculum related to gardening, and have scheduled at least one science class per week, per grade to occur in the greenhouse.