Galax Elementary School

The GCPS Garden has identified four major goals.
1.The GCPS Garden will provide a cross-curricular educational place of learning to be used by Galax district schools for class and extracurricular use.
2.GCPS Garden will donate its produce to the students who qualify for free and reduced lunch to encourage healthy eating at home; additional produce will be donated to local soup kitchens to benefit the needy in the community.
3.The GCPS Garden will provide an area of recreation and learning for the summer recreation program serving the Galax area.
4.The GCPSGarden will provide hands-on nutritional instruction for a better understanding of healthy eating across Galax Elementary School.

The vision for the Grateful Garden of Galax is for the space to provide multiple cross curricular opportunities for learning. Firstly, it should be a place for agriculture and the study of plants. Students should have the ability to start a plant from seed and to watch it grow under their care to mature into a fruit baring plant. The students will be able to maintain the health of their own garden areas and integrate their garden learning with other topics in the classroom.
The committee envisions that the garden is outfitted with educational tools to make outdoor learning possible. Items of interest include a garden scale for students to track the weight of their produce, hanging chalk boards for classes to graph their harvests, color charts for crop readiness comparisons. In addition, the committee hopes to incorporate literature through the placement of nature and gardening quotes by famous writers. The outdoor learning pavilion would be an ideal place to discuss weather, cloud formations, seasons, and many other science topics. The pavilion should be large enough to enable an entire class to have an outdoor lesson.
The use of the garden isn