So you have started a school garden and you want to use it to teach lessons for your classes…how do you get started and where can you find help? The good news is that you are not the first educator to use a school garden to teach students and there are lots of places to find the help you need quickly!
Here are some resources to help you get started:
- Edible Schoolyard offers curricula for learning in school or at home using garden based and cooking activities.
- FoodCorps lessons include hands-on experiential activities to engage kids in learning about healthy food. These lessons are for grades K-5 and are organized by grade, season, and theme. The lessons are tied to national academic standards and were developed following best practices and frameworks.
- Green Schoolyards America offers Schoolyard Activity Guides designed to provide a wide range of outdoor activity ideas for schools that work with students ages 3 to 18 years old and includes 131 ideas for year-round school ground activities, written by 122 organizations from across the United States.
- Kids Gardening has ready-made lessons for you in their Resources section on the Lesson Plan page that you can sort by contest type, topic, grade, season and indoor/outdoor.
- Lifelab offers school garden resources you can search by category.
- Maine School Garden Network Teaching in Your School Garden resource page offers resources to enable school garden coordinators and educators to teach students about a myriad of topics using a school garden such as lesson planning tools plus a monthly school garden checklist.
- National Agriculture in the Classroom Curriculum Resources offers lesson plans, books, activities, bulletin boards & posters, instructional resources, kits, movies and websites.
- Teach ME About Food & Farms has a collection of lessons and resources for educators in Grades K-12 that is accessible and searchable by topic, grade, Maine Learning Results and Common Core Standards.
