West Melbourne School For Science

At WMSS we offer gardening on the activity wheel.  Students receive gardening and nutrition lessons weekly.  We let 4-6 grade students choose their activity on Mondays and Tuesday's for extra gardening.  In the program, we plant seasonal vegetables and harvest when ready.  We give harvest to staff to make salads, salsa, smoothies and other healthy snacks for students and staff to enjoy.  We plan to extend out to our community in the near future through farmers markets where WMSS student gardeners supply the produce.  When our county permits, we will give harvest to our cafeteria, and we are  working to create this positive transition in the near future.  Our mission is to educate all stakeholders on how to create a cohesive, sustainable schoolwide garden that promotes healthy eating habits and awareness. We have a wonderfully diverse population, which includes cultures from around the globe. 

Academic Achievement: Gardening helps our students in all areas of academic learning, such as mindfulness, focusing, math and science.  We encourage our teachers to bring students out to the garden even though they have garden weekly because we understand being in the garden can increase test scores, creates good behavior and attitude.  

Increased Health:  We try to educate students to make wise choices when it comes to food through food education and understanding.  We teach how to read labels and understand the effects of what they are eating and how it affects the body.  When we grow, we are able eat, which encourages the whole food approach to diet.  We research the foods we are growing in order to understand why we need this food to be healthy while also learning about the human body along with what vitamins it needs for healthy functioning. 

Essential Life Skills:  In the garden, we teach the life skills necessary to grow, maintain and harvest our own crops.  We solve problems such as why the plant may not be growing and how we can better our soil.  We discuss the future population of the world, and how we can be the change now and for the future. We are able to impelement math concepts through measuring and using the garden space to its full potential.

Our Garden Vision:  Our vision is to bring gardening and its benefits to the forefront of education for our students, families and our commumnity.  All children should have the opportunity to see first hand how growing food promotes a healthy, sustainable lifestyle.  In the future, we want to see all students growing food in school gardens, community gardens, and home gardens. We would like to turn these aspirations into a reality.