Dale Junior High School

Our school garden was a vision of several teachers, along with the blessings of our administrative team, to create a "live" outdoor classroom that would promote hands-on learning while tackling the guidelines of Common Core Curriculum in numerous courses of study. We believe that if you provide the students will valuable, practical and relevant material, our students will soar to heights that we can not even imagine.

With this being the first full year of our garden, students are learning the valuable lesson of how to produce a sustainable garden and the impact it has at the school site as well as within the community. Science classes are using engineering skills to invent environmentally, yet drought-tolerant, watering systems. The art class is using the beauty of nature to capture still-life creations. The Special Education Department is using the garden to provide opportunities to foster team-building skills for many of the emotionally disturbed students at our site. The Home Economic classes are creating vegetable gardens from which the produce that is harvested by the students will be used directly by the students in cooking labs to highlight the garden-to-table mentality.

Students are beginning to take ownership in his/her nutritional choices as well as it spilling over to their families. Because of the garden environment, students at Dale are learning valuable lifelong lessons.