School Gardens

School gardens are living classrooms that provide students with experiential, hands-on learning environments that encourage inquiry, observation, and experimentation across multiple subject areas. Students who participate in school gardens are actively engaged in planning, planting, growing, harvesting, and tasting new foods. These gardens help students connect abstract concepts to real-world applications and support academic achievement, often leading to higher standardized test scores.

• Review this Growing School Gardens Throughout the Year PowerPoint presentation to learn how school gardens can be used as classrooms, tips on growing school gardens, and food safety in school gardens. 
• Learn how to grow, harvest, and serve food safely with these Food Safety Guides for Your Gardens.
• Review the Rules for the School Garden poster with students to establish safety rules in and around the garden.
• Visit Planning a School Garden to learn what you need to know about starting and caring for various types of school gardens.  
• Engage young children in gardening through simple hands-on gardening activities:
  • Garden in a Glove – Use clear food-prep gloves, moist cotton balls, and seeds to allow children to observe sprouting seeds.
  • Lettuce Cup Terrarium –  Plant lettuce seeds in a paper cup with a clear lid or plastic wrap, which holds in heat and moisture, so children can grow their own small salad garden.
  • Seed Baby Necklace – Use a small plastic bag with yarn attached so children can keep their baby seeds close and warm as they watch the seeds sprout. 
• Teach nutrition through gardening:
  • Edible ABCs teaches preschool-age children about how and where different fruits and vegetables are grown around the world while practicing the alphabet.  More than half of the items can be grown in small gardens, including lettuce, broccoli, bell peppers, radishes, snap peas, and tomatoes. 
  • Little Food Explorers introduces preschool-age children to different fruits and vegetables with each season, using photo cards and fun activities to help children become more familiar and willing to try new foods.
  • Read for Health is a storybook-based curriculum for grades K-2 with many themes related to growing and tasting foods from the garden.
  • Veggie Voyagers is a gardening and nutrition curriculum for grades K-2 that introduces young children to gardening by learning about the parts of the plant that we eat, conducting experiments, and growing edible plants. 
  • Edible Garden Lab is a garden-based nutrition curriculum for grades 3-5 that gets students involved in planning, planting, growing, and harvesting edible plants, while learning how to make informed choices about the foods they eat.