Wasatch Community Gardens offers different levels of curricula for the school garden.
A Beginners Guide To Growing and Eating Out of A School Garden - Year 1
Curriculum A
For beginning gardeners and garden educators, we have a simple year-long curriculum that only requires 1-1.5 hours a month. This curriculum is focused on growing and eating food out of the garden. It includes everything from what seeds to buy, how to grow them and how to eat the plants they produce! There are small nutrition lessons involved with each monthly lesson, but the true focus of this curriculum is giving educators that have never gardened or taught in the garden a simple, easy to follow guide to growing food with students.
Throughout the years, one of the most common refrains that Wasatch Community Gardens hears from school gardens is that teachers just don't know what to do out in the garden. After digging a bit deeper into that statement, we have found that the root of the issue lies in trying to fit the garden year to the school year.
Most casual gardeners are avid tomato and cucumber growers, but those are summer crops! They need almost constant care and attention during exactly the months that no one is at school and they give off their harvest in small amounts, which is hard to design a lesson plan around.
This curriculum introduces teachers to crops that grow during the school year and produce all at once, so they are easy to when trying to feed a whole class.
This curriculum has lesson plans for the nine growing months of the year and includes planting plans and worksheets. Everything you need to get started with growing and eating food with your class out in the garden is included here.
Let's get growing!
Downloads:
- Download the Master Supply List (this is everything you will need for your entire year of lessons)
- February - Seed Catalogue Valentines
- March - Planting A Rainbow
- April - Watch It Grow
- May - Salad Party!
- June/July
- August - Back To School
- September - Eating Pumpkins
- October - Kale Salads
- November - Sugar Beets
- If you teach pre-K or Kindergarten, we have written some adaptions to make the curriculum better suited for your students: Download the Kindergarten Adaptions
Curriculum B
The other curriculum that we offer is much more in-depth. This curriculum assumes that educators are familiar with gardening and with teaching out in the garden. This curriculum has weekly science-based lesson plans that correlate with the Utah Core Standards for each grade. This curriculum is more time and preperation intensive, which enables it to really dive deeper into the science that is happening out in the garden.