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!

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.