Help Chehalem students integrate their curriculum with a school garden. A garden based learning experience from k-5 will provide a positive impact on our student’s knowledge, attitudes, grades, and create a community of learners connected to the Earth. This school garden will provide real-life applications across all academic areas including STEM ( Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). Our diverse K-5 school houses 494 learners of all types.  Access to a garden and an opportunity to understand how our food grows would be a unique experience for many of our students.

This project is centered around our commitment to teaching Next Generation Science Standards in a meaningful context, but the scope of the project runs deeper than our standards. It would provide a connection to the earth for students who don’t have access to green space in their home lives.  It would raise environmental awareness and consciousness among our students. Further, a garden that kindergartners through fifth graders use, would help build a sense of community in our school. Having nearly 500 students invest in one cause opens up opportunities for students to work with each other across grade levels.

Because NGSS concepts build on each other through the years (and are often revisited more than once throughout a child’s education), the garden acts as a constant to root our standards within. The garden will help with student retention by having a meaningful real-life connection for students to attach their learning to through their six years at Chehalem.

• Kindergarten - studying what plants and animals need to survive
• 1st Grade - mimicking how plants use their anatomy to help them grow and survive
• 2nd Grade - students will begin to study how animals pollinate plants and consider how different habitats are more suited to certain living organisms than others
• 3rd Grade - students will continue to build on the concepts introduced in the past three years, as well as start thinking about how the plants they are working with have inherited the traits of the generations before them
• 4th Grade - revisit and review plant anatomy to help them grow and survive
• 5th Grade- students will understand what plants need in order to survive, and begin to study how energy flows through an ecosystem (even a small one, like a garden).

Students will demonstrate understanding by becoming caretakers of the garden. They will have an opportunity to show scientific methods through plant related inquiry. In the early elementary grades, students will be able to journal or use observation logs. As students grow through the grade levels they will be able to use models,  technology, and reports to demonstrate their learning.

Garden boxes: $412

Green house: $600

Rain Barrels: $500

Compost bin: $150

Soil: $200

Various plants, vegetables, fruits, spring bulbs: $600