Garden Classrooms

Searcy County School District

We seek to actively engage children in the process of growing food and arm them with the knowledge of why and how to eat healthfully. Our project highlights gardening both as a type of physical activity and as a way to study the natural world. This grant will make it possible for us to engage more students from our district in this enriching educational experience working with more students from a broader age group to encourage appreciation for healthy eating and healthy lifestyle choices.

Science / Engineering Magnet High School

The goal of the garden program is to expose students to the origin of their food and factors affecting the production of food. There is a veil among urban students between how our food is produced and the food itself. The purpose of a garden is to help lift that veil so that students would see the connection between food production soil management and sustainability and the inherent difficulties/rewards of growing one's own food while applying current scientific knowledge to the process.

School of the Holy Child

The goals of the garden will be to help porvide food for the needy of Westchester; to provide opportunities for academic exploration to our students; to teach our students to be good stewards of the land; and to build an even stronger school community by involving students teachers and parents in a common project.

School District of Bayfield

This year we hope to improve the sandy soil of our garden site and implement a garden plan that uses zones to organize shared garden management crop rotation winter composting and continued soil improvement. With proper soil and garden management we will increase the amount of garden produce used in our cafeteria and show students how much a small space can produce potentially inspiring students to start gardens at home and making an impact on family and community health.

Kalispell Public Schools, District No. 5 Flathead County

Kalispell Public Schools and FoodCorps Montana have partnered since 2011 in an effort to connect the approximately 6,000 students in District 5 with real food so they can grow up healthy. We work to achieve this goal through classroom nutrition lessons, garden-based education, and by building a Food Service Program centered on local procurement and healthy, from-scratch cooking.

District 5 currently hosts seven edible gardens and an orchard. Over the next few growing seasons, as the gardens expand, we hope to incorporate more of the harvest into the breakfast and lunch menu. 

Santa Fe Public Schools

Children learn about healthy food and skills to grow their own fruits and vegetables from the school gardens. Earth Care wants to provide additional support to the gardens in the form of larger tools to share and buying resources in bulk. Goals for 2012 are to increase the amount of food provided to the students by implementing longer seasons protecting garden beds during the summer and determining the best plants to grow in Northern New Mexico.

Santa Fe Indian School

The School wishes to add raised beds more fruit trees and to improve upon the outdoor classroom.

Santa Clarita Valley International Charter School

The Whole Foods Grant would allow the facilitators at SCVi to expand the current curriculum into a hands-on experience for children ages K through 10th grade. While science nutrition and mathematics easily translate into an outdoor garden curriculum we hope to expand it into other areas as well such as writing art and reading. This correlates well with our school philosophy of project-based learning.

Sand Point Elementary School

Creating a community where children empower themselves with healthy lifestyle choices rooted in sustainable agricultural practices. The garden program will instruct on best practices in urban agriculture and foster thinking on cultural and socio-economic issues of global and local food cultivation. We hope that by enabling them to share the bounty of their harvest with the community a lifelong commitment to sustainable food growing and healthful eating will hold.

San Antonio School for Inquiry and Creativity

The goal for our garden is to provide our students with experiential learning in a healthy outdoor setting. The garden will involve all age levels and all curricular area in our school. The harvest from the garden will be used in our school salad bar and to supplement our school food bank distributions. Our students will take some of the harvest home to their families. The remaining harvest will be made available to the community at large along with transplants for home gardens.

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