Michigan Islamic Academy

The goal of our school garden is to help our students become excited about growing and eating locally grown food from organic sources. We are very committed to encouraging our students to adopt healthy eating habits, which we hope the grant will enable us to do by making it possible for us to grow our own vegetables. We also hope to foster the notion of responsibility in our younger students, as we intend to have each elementary classroom be responsible for their own section of the garden. Our plan is to integrate our gardens into the classroom. We have already done so on a small scale, where students in some of the elementary classes are given seeds in a small container filled with soil and they are elated when their seeds actually grow into a vegetable, but this grant will allow us to do this so on a grander scale. They will be able to be involved in the whole process of gardening. The grant will also help us achieve our goal of teaching gardening to our students and providing our students with a more hands-on/interactive science education.