Truscott Elementary School

The overarching goal of our garden project is to create a beautiful and productive space which will serve as an extension of our school and an intersection point with our community. We plan to accomplish this, with the support of this grant, by continuing and expanding upon our existing vegetable garden with additional horticulture and habitat projects. Through these projects we will grow our garden into a large, vibrant, attractive neighborhood center which provides healthy food and learning opportunities year round. By pursuing this vision we will work towards many connected goals, outlined as follows.

As we develop our garden we will interweave the organization, planning, and implementation of these projects into our curriculum so as to provide meaningful and motivating project based learning across grade levels. The math, science, and language arts inherent in the gardening process will provide our teachers with real world, multisensory lessons for their students. By connecting academics with planning, planting, growing, and harvesting we will make abstract subjects tangible and engaging for our students and we expect that their interest and learning will increase. Many studies have shown that garden educational programs improve academic performance, including test scores (Klemmer, et al, 2005; Bell, 2001; Smith & Motsenbocke, 2005)

In addition to enabling our teachers to creatively teach traditional subjects the garden will also provide a framework for teaching and engaging our students about nutrition, physical activity, and wellness. These subjects are timely and critical on both a local and national level and educators are being encouraged from the highest levels to incorporate them into daily school life. One of the goals of our garden is to bring our school to the forefront of develops in education by prioritizing the health of our students by providing nutrition, exercise, and stress relief opportunities via this garden project. Positive changes in the health of students is a reported outcome of many school gardening programs (Lieberman & Hoody, 1998; Murphy, 2003); we expect that our garden will improve the health and well-being of our students.

Additionally, we aim to improve the health of our community by providing fresh fruit and vegetables to our school kitchen and our families from the produce grown in our garden. Most of the families our school serves are at risk of nutritional deficits and food insecurity. Due to economic challenges and lack of education and awareness regarding nutrition, our students and families particularly lack unprocessed, nutritionally dense foods such as fruits and vegetables. Our garden has the potential to counteract this problem both by providing free, fresh food and by raising awareness and increasing education amongst our students and their families about the importance of healthy eating.

Another goal of our garden is to create a green space in our neighborhood for local wildlife. As concerns about our local and global environment continue to grow in the face of global warming, wildfires, overdevelopment, and the loss of habitat, we at Truscott want to be part of the solution. We plan to do this by creating a safe space for nature through our garden, and by cultivating citizens who care about the environment by exposing our students the natural world and giving them a chance to act as environmental caretakers. We plan to use and teach environmentally friendly gardening methods and utilize the many teaching moments gardening offers to discuss ways in which we as gardeners can cooperate with our local ecosystem. We hope that this grant will enable us to develop projects that benefit the specific needs of our local environment, such as the creation of honeybee hives or the planting of native plants that feed and attract threatened bird or insect species. We also plan to expand our garden