Resource Library

Garden-based education is for everyone! As garden education professionals we have a responsibility to our students to make the amazing learning that happens around a garden bed accessible and engaging to all of our students. In 2016 we set out to increase our ability to include learners with diverse learning needs through the adaptation of our educational practices, materials, and curriculum. This packet is a compilation of the information we learned through this 12-month project. We hope it can be of use to other garden educators.

This innovative resource, created in partnership with City Blossoms, is informed by the work of their Youth Entrepreneurship Cooperative (YEC) program. It is complete with templates and tools to support anyone interested in connecting high school youth with gardens and entrepreneurship skill-building.

WHAT YOU WILL FIND INSIDE: This workbook includes in-depth insights from City Blossoms staff, who have committed more than seven years to growing the YEC program. This resource gives insight into City Blossoms' philosophy for: recruiting participants; forming local partnerships; designing a safe and inviting meeting space; and launching a youth-led cooperative business. This workbook is filled with guiding questions to assist others in developing their own unique adaptation of this program.

Developed by educators at Rooted, this is a short guide to getting started in the garden, for educators looking to begin gardening but overwhelmed by the amount of information out there! Plants Want to Grow includes a guide to climate zone maps, reading seed packets, and transplanting your baby seedlings into the garden. 

Some information in this guide is specific to gardening in Wisconsin but most of the information is applicable to any new or beginner gardener. 

School gardens are an integral part of farm to school programs and offer a multitude of educational opportunities. This fact sheet offers steps and considerations for starting a school garden, including: collaboration, goals and design, funding, planting, maintaining, supplies, curriculum and benefits.

Looking for a nature based homeschooling curriculum that’s exciting, easy to use, and created by expert educators? How about monthly videos, activities, and live classes? 

The Home Garden Classroom: Kids and Adults Learning & Gardening Together is a fun “edutainment” subscription that's a convenient, supportive, and affordable way to integrate STEM and garden based learning experiences into your child’s education. This curriculum, created by professional educators, is geared toward kids aged 5-10, aligns with NYS Common Core standards, and is guaranteed to bring joy and wonder into the lives of you and your little ones!

Celebrating Seasonality: Wisconsin-Grown Recipes for the Early Childhood Setting is a collection of twelve child-friendly recipes for the ECE setting that feature seasonal fruits and vegetables. These fun breakfast, lunch, and snack recipes promote the use of Wisconsin-grown produce in all ECE settings. Recipes are scaled for 8 and 25 servings and include serving sizes for different ages groups and CACFP crediting information. Celebrating Seasonality also includes information to help you find more local foods, a seasonality chart of Wisconsin crops, interviews with Wisconsin farmers, and stories from Wisconsin ECE sites serving local foods.

Celebrating Seasonality in available in both English and Spanish and features universal recipes using produce available in many geographic regions.

To help grow a classroom of thriving students, the new Junior Master Gardener - Early Childhood Learn, Grow, Eat & Go curriculum combines rich plant/garden learning, food exposure, fun brain- & body-boosting physical activities, AND novel parent/school community engagement in a fun, teacher-friendly format!

Save planning time with this step-by-step, 4 week unit that equips teachers with daily engaging lessons, group activities, and journal prompts that lead your class to create a simple, thriving vegetable garden. Weekly featured songs, literature connections, classroom garden kitchen recipes, innovative family engagement tools, and effective center resources complement learning and maximize benefits to students.

Faculty from Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service and University of Nebraska - Lincoln Extension, created this curricula with support from Head Start teachers, kindergarten teachers, and content experts in the field of early childhood development. This multifaceted garden, nutrition, and physical activity curriculum is specially designed for teachers of 4 & 5-year-old children.

Learn, Grow, Eat & GO! is a curricula of the International Junior Master Gardener program. Created by Extension faculty/staff, teachers, nutrition and gardening experts, this multifaceted evidenced-based curricula integrates gardening, nutrition, healthy eating and physical activity into an academically rich curricula.

Through a linear set of hands-on, proven lessons, students will gain understand how plants grow and how plants provide for people's needs. The 10-week (2 lessons/week) unit of study will step a class through the process of establishing a garden, growing and eating from the garden, and integrates math, science, reading, and social studies into the curricula. Curricula, classroom sets of student garden journals, and accompanying children's literature books utilized within the curricula are available for purchase through the Junior Master Gardener website. Additionally, sample lessons, garden kitchen recipe videos, individual student garden journal pages, parent support materials and other resources are available for free through the website. The entire LGEG curricula, garden kitchen recipes, student garden journals, and parent letters are available in both English and Spanish.

This curricula was evaluated through a USDA AFRI grant for obesity prevention in children and all content was pilot tested by teachers, volunteers, and youth educators. Details on this longitudinal study and behavioral outcomes can be found on the research section of the website. Content experts related to youth education, horticulture, nutrition, and parenting provided review of content.

This K-5 curriculum from National Wildlife Federation was designed to engage students in learning about pollinator habitats, the connections between plants and animals, and our role in the environment. It is a placed-based curriculum which allows students to learn about biodiversity, ecosystems and habitats through direct experience and observation. The culmination is the creation of their own schoolyard pollinator habitat.

The curriculum is organized by season, beginning in September. The lessons reflect what is happening in nature and take advantage of opportunities for field observation. Although it says "Growing A Wild NYC" this curriculum is useable in any urban environment.

NWF's Schoolyard Habitats Guide helps communities to plan, build, and maintain a NWF Schoolyard Habitats® garden, leading you through a clear, step-by-step process. You’ll also find Green STEAM learning opportunities for students and many environment-based teaching tools.

Shelburne Farms' Cultivating Joy and Wonder brings Education for Sustainability into your early childhood classroom through engaging activities, essays, and resources that encourage children to explore and engage in the world around them.

Includes more than 75 “facilitated learning experiences” organized around four “threads” that flow through the seasons: Who Are We?, Who Lives Here?, What’s Happening?, and How Are We Connected?

The FoodCorps Lessons for food and garden educators includes hands-on experiential activities to engage kids in learning about healthy food. Lessons are organized by grade, season, and theme; are tied to national academic standards; and were developed following Culturally Responsive Teaching, Place Based Learning, and Social and Emotional Learning best practices and frameworks.


This suite of 96 lessons are for grades K-5.

Early childhood sites can foster strong family partnerships with farm to ECE activities. Family engagement is central to early care and education quality. When families are involved in education, children benefit, the program benefits, and families benefit.

This resource from Rooted has ideas on how to use farm to ECE to engage families.

Hands on activities for composting and vermicomposting in school!

By using the activities in this guide, you will be joining thousands of teachers across the country in bringing compost into the classroom as a valuable teaching tool. The activities you’ll find in Do the Rot Thing are hands-on and encourage student exploration and learning.

Do the Rot Thing has been made available to educators through the efforts of the Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District in collaboration with the Northern Vermont Composting Partnership.

Community Garden Resource Guide by Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. This free guide includes steps, resources, and examples for organizing, designing, planting, and sustaining a community garden.

Slow Food USA, in partnership with Whole Kids Foundation, has developed a toolkit to help school district food services safely bring school garden produce onto the lunch line!

The Growing Minds Farm to Preschool Toolkit contains all of our farm to preschool resources, including lesson plans, “This Week in the Garden” activity guides, “Farm to School Goes Home” parent handouts, local food sourcing guidance, and tips for cooking and gardening with young children. It also includes a resource developed by the NC Farm to Preschool Network, “Reach for the Stars with Farm to Preschool“, which aligns the Early Childhood and Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scales (revised editions) with farm to preschool activities.

This second edition, published in 2020, is updated with a new, easy to use format and streamlined recipes. The Toolkit is available in hardcopy (see details on how to order a copy below), or as a free digital download. 

Available in English and Spanish.

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This free, downloadable curriculum provides high school students with a deep understanding of critical food system issues, empowers them to make healthy and responsible food choices, and encourages them to become advocates for food system change.

Understanding Food and Climate Change: An Interactive Guide uses video, photography, text, and interactive experiences to help educators, students, and advocates learn how food and climate systems interact and how personal choices canmake a difference. Ideal for grades 6–12 and general audiences, with connections to Next Generation Science Standards and the National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies themes, the guide offers activities for student research and resources for further investigation. The guide is also designed to support self-guided and independent study, and is a boon for advocates seeking hopeful strategies and creative responses.

Available as a free iBook for Mac and iPad users.

A web version is available for all computers and tablets

In a garden we are able to cultivate children’s love of learning, their appreciation of healthy food, and their connection to the natural world. With vision, commitment, and some good hard work, educators and families around the globe are ripping up pavement, sowing seeds, and growing garden classrooms because they believe children need to be engaged by hands-on learning in a context that matters to them. They need to know how delicious fresh healthy food can be; and they need to know, right down in their bones, that they are part of a vast and beautiful web of life.

And so, in schoolyards and community spaces across the country, a movement has been born. As a result, new questions have emerged. Chief among them: how do we best use these gardens to achieve our goals and provide children with the best possible experiences? In Teaching in Nature's Classroom: Principles of Garden-Based Education, Nathan Larson shares a philosophy of teaching in the garden. Rooted in years of experience and supported by research, he presents fifteen guiding principles of garden-based education. These principles and best practices are illustrated through engaging stories from the field. The book features vivid paintings by mural artist Becky Hiller and connections to the research literature provided by Alex Wells and Sam Dennis of the University of Wisconsin Environmental Design Lab.

Across the United States, a growing number of schools and educational programs are planting gardens, engaging in Farm to School activities, and integrating plant science into the curriculum. To support and expand these hands-on learning activities, schools are exploring ways to build new infrastructure or reinvest in existing facilities such as greenhouses. Unfortunately, many school greenhouses are underutilized or only a single knowledgeable and dedicated teacher is enabling their use.

The United States Botanic Garden, the National Center for Appropriate Technology, and City Blossoms recognized the emerging need for user-friendly guidance on operating these educational greenhouses and maximizing their potential. To that end, we have developed this introductory manual for educators wanting to better use new or existing greenhouses for programming. The manual clearly and concisely lays out a basic understanding of greenhouses, how to integrate them into lessons, and how to effectively use greenhouses in classroom curricula and out-of-school activities. The manual includes lesson plans as well as basic information on layout and operations of a greenhouse, growing plants (especially during the school year), growing from seed, seedling nutrition, identifying and treating disease and pest management in greenhouses, basic budgeting, and succession planting.

This useful resource will help facilitate transformative learning experiences in schools nationwide, while cultivating students' appreciation of the importance of plants.

The Scotts Miracle-Gro Foundation, National Head Start Association and KidsGardening have joined together for the Gro More Good National Head Start Garden Program Initiative to inspire and support the growth of garden programs in early childhood education settings, especially for one million at-risk Head Start children and families across the country.  Our mission is to bring the powerful, life-enhancing benefits of gardens to ECE centers to help the combat some of the most pressing challenges facing today’s youngest generation by improving access to healthy food and increasing time spent outdoors connected to nature.

• basic how-to information for growing plants hydroponically in your classroom;
• lesson plans to help students learn through hands-on investigations;
• construction plans for simple hydroponics setups; and
• additional reference materials to support your endeavors.

Digging into Soil (available as a free download) includes 10 lessons written to help educators use a garden program to teach students about soil. The target audience for Digging into Soil is grades 9 -12 and the activities are linked to high school level Next Generation Science Standards. The lessons can be adapted for middle school ages too and are designed to not only teach students about soil basics, but also to help them understand the important role our soil and soil life plays in our ecosystem and why we must work harder to protect it. Incorporating hands-on activities and extensive projects linked to current events, the goal of this Guide is to make soil real to participating students.

The lessons are flexible enough that they could be implemented with or without a garden program, but being able to see the principles presented play out first hand in the garden is extremely beneficial. Students’ sense of ownership and pride in their garden adds to the motivation to learn about soil health. 

Digging into Soil: A Garden Practicum is an activity guide written by KidsGardening in cooperation with The Lower Sugar River Watershed Association as a complement to the booklet “S” is for Soil.