Gardens build healthy life styles, and community. My students need gardens to teach them access to healthy food choices, friends within a community garden.,Lakeshore kits bring meaningful science based learning. We built our garden now we need the learning kits
My students have significant cognitive and health disabilities.
My program is the Extended Core with inclusion opportunities. They need to learn skills that will give them a quality life. Growing your own food, helping in a community garden is an activity that breaks down barriers. Gardening curriculum and practice will give them the skills to grow food, perhaps work within a community garden setting and understand basic relationships between the weather, gardens, soils, and time.
Our first year, we have actually built four raised garden beds, planted seeds and conditioned the soil. The students have gone from learning how to handle tools, to now asking about plants, soil, temperature, seasons because this directly relates on a daily basis.
My Project
I need garden and science materials that are relevant. I am requesting Lakeshore materials to align with my curriculum that will be meaningful for students with significant disabilities that align directly with our newest life skill unit. We are a high school class and have built four large raised garden beds at out school. What started as a life activity (grow vegetables and herbs) has unleashed within these students a curiosity about weather, plants, climate, temperature and how these work together.
It also has brought together a community, the students bring the peer tutors to show them the garden. In doing so, I find these high school students also are learning how to pick produce, fight off unwanted bugs, and weed. Now more students are asking if we can add more beds and how to make the garden expand to include the preschool housed within our campus and science and art departments!
By supporting this project, you will open up the world to this group of students.
They will continue to learn the fundamental skills of gardening and the reasons why weather, plants, and climate work together. It will help me guide this program to meet the core standards with fun and engaging materials.
These students need quality life skills and gardening is a way for them to improve and control part of their food source, extend it into cooking and prep/storage as well as be a community member.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Weiler and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.