Our students are caring, ambitious, and learn more effectively in a hands on environment. Gabby and CJ decide they would like to build a greenhouse to teach the students about nutrition, healthy food preparation, and to be able to grow vegetables year round to donate to the food bank and homeless.
In the past two years, our students have built and maintained a raised bed garden at our school. They read about the "Grow them a row" program through the local food bank, where you grow a row of food in your garden specifically for the food bank. Even though the students currently donate a portion of our harvest to the local food bank, they decided they wanted to focus on donating more food year round. The students also are preparing monthly lunches for the students at our school to teach about nutrition and healthy eating, as well as to create a sense of community within our school. They also prepare dinners for the local homeless shelter and want to prepare more of these meals using food they have grown. We are a school with a 46% free and reduced lunch population, and the students feel it is important to teach their peers about the importance of nutrition and healthy eating, and how they can prepare healthy meals on a budget.
Our students will learn an abundance of skills through this project, from 21st Century skills of collaboration, critical thinking, and decision making through academic and real life skills. They will collaborate to plan out the building/assembling of the green house and will develop the skill sets necessary to construct it, with help from adult volunteers. They will learn science skills by studying soils, germination, plant care, harvesting, etc. Health skills will be learned and reinforced by learning about nutrition, proper food handling, and cooking skills will be practiced through food preparation and preservation. Students will explore potential careers in food science and agriculture and will develop a lifelong love of food preparation, preservation, gardening, and giving.
In Their Own Words
We would love to build a greenhouse that we as students would manage. In our greenhouse we would grow food for the local food bank and homeless shelter as well as for our school. Science, Math, Cooking, Leadership, and the middle school program would all be working on and benefiting from our greenhouse.
As students, we will learn math and other valuable skills by assembling the greenhouse on our own. We will use compost that we make ourselves with scraps recycled from cooking class and people's lunches. We will do research and learn about soil and how to care about various species of plants. Everything we grow we will plant and care for by ourselves. Students will cook the food for the homeless shelter using the kitchen in the cooking class. We will bring the food to the food bank and shelter.
The skills we learn by assembling the greenhouse and making our own compost will help us later in life. We would have more options for plants we can grow if we had a greenhouse. We would also be more successful in growing the plants inside a greenhouse than we would be growing them outside unprotected from the elements and harsh growing conditions. The food we grow in our new greenhouse will be used by the cooking class to feed the homeless and a portion of what we grow would go to the food bank.
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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. Weinkauf and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.