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.