Growing School Food Gardens

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  • 1.  STEAM Garden Stories

    Posted 03-08-2022 03:24:00 PM

    In follow up to the STEAM in the School Food Garden Webinar, I would like to start this thread as a place for folks to share personal stories about integrating STEAM into the school food garden – both successes and challenges – and use this as a way to move talking about curriculum and standards from being abstract to being concrete and practical.



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    Sarah Pounders
    Senior Education Specialist
    The Woodlands TX
    832-418-6540
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  • 2.  RE: STEAM Garden Stories

    Posted 03-10-2022 02:42:00 PM
    Hi there!
    We integrate lessons about pollinators, food chains, and life cycles into the garden though sit spot journaling and observations. We make observations of the garden every month and record the seasonal changes we witness in the garden (from sprouts to fruit and interactions with pollinators & seed dispersers). We also use math skills when planting to space out our seeds and seedlings in bigger plots.   
    Sarah

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    Sarah Navarro
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  • 3.  RE: STEAM Garden Stories

    Posted 03-11-2022 09:46:00 AM
    Good morning! We are a brand new garden program and did a trial run with our ECE kiddos last summer as our school age students were still virtual, but some things we found successful were taking the young children out in the garden and allowing them to harvest the produce. They would then take it back to their classroom and they did taste tests, they pickled some vegetables, they baked muffins using zucchini, etc. We also had them harvest vegetables that they could cut open and look at the differences and similarities on the inside of various vegetables. What does it look like? Comparing the seeds (number, size, shape, etc.) For art, children created art with some of our produce i.e. leaf prints with large leafy vegetables like kale; rolling corn cobs in paint and making textured paintings, etc. We didn't even do all of the amazing things you could do because our program is so new. We are now reserving garden beds by grade level and grades that are participating will create signs for their Beds and what they're growing. We hope that on our Field Day this year that we can have our garden be a station in the rotation where we'll talk about the benefits of the garden, how to start their gardens and make a plan for each grade level garden with student input guiding the direction of the gardens.

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    Kim Schubring
    St. Joseph Academy
    Milwaukee WI
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  • 4.  RE: STEAM Garden Stories

    Posted 03-21-2022 07:43:00 PM
    These are all such fun ideas! It's awesome that you are getting the young children involved in cooking, too :)

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    Erica Krug
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