My students are full of curiosity and have an excitement for questioning thinking! They are our future leaders, dreamers, doctors, lawyers, politicians and teachers! They inspire me to be the best teacher I can be for them! They are the future of this amazing country and I want to give them the tools to foster their curiosity and innovation! We are a Title 1 funded school with 76% of our student receiving free or reduced lunches. We are diverse school with over 25% of our students identified as American Indian, Asian, Black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, or Native Hawaiian.
My Project
Have you ever wondered where your next meal was going to come from? This is a thought that runs through the minds of a large population of our students on a daily basis. Food insecurity is an issue that can disrupt a child’s ability to fully be engaged during the school day. This grant would allow us to help teach our students about nutritional stability in a real world and hands on way. With the funding of this grant we would be able to purchase an aeroponic tower garden complete with seeds, growing lights, and the needed minerals to maintain the garden into our 6th grade classrooms. Students would be able to grow fresh herbs, fruits and vegetables in a year round environment. Some of the items the students would grow and cultivate are spinach, tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, cucumbers, lettuce, strawberries and a variety of beans! Since the students will be able to cultivate foods continuously through the tower garden, they will have experience through the whole year starting seedlings, transferring them into the tower garden and lastly harvesting the crop. This would allow the students to have numerous opportunities through the year to work directly with the tower gardens. This allows us to continuously feed fresh produce to the students through the whole school year. If the tower garden produces enough, we can even allow families to take food home. Springfield Community Gardens has a collaboration with Ozarks Food Harvest to provide fresh produce to communities such as Grant Beach, an area from which our students are from, through the produce harvested in community gardens in the area.
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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. Armstrong and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
