Our vision is to encourage all schools to have seasonal school gardens and school garden curriculum to provide garden-based learning experiences for students. We want to expose children to fresh seasonal vegetables, and encourage them to make better nutritional decisions improving overall health and education.
Although we believe in setting a foundation through the basic understanding of school gardening, we understand that is only a starting point. It is imperative to integrate school garden programs with local farms and provide better nutritional food for students. By encouraging interaction between local farmers and schools, children can understand more of where their food comes from while farmers reduce their carbon footprint by delivering locally.
We also believe it is essential to reform the nutritional standards by which school meals are served. Children will preform better in school if they are served the right kinds of nutritional food in a way that appeals to them. We want to encourage programs that are working on school meal reform throughout the country to use eachother, along with local farms and school gardens to form the ideal vision of nutrition and education.
PlantingProgress is an advocate of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move Initiative.
Our preschool class just finished having a garden put into their small lot of land. Earlier in the year we planted our own individual containers of grass seed and talked about other vegt for our future garden. QUESTION: For 4 & 5 year olds – what kind of work can they do in a small patch of land and still keep ‘hands on’ for them and keep the interest going? Thank you for any suggestions. Lena