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How to Grow a School Garden: A Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers

By Arden Bucklin-Sporer and Rachel Kathleen Pringle

A valuable tool for creating rich learning experiences and helping children reconnect to the natural world.

Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods

In this groundbreaking resource, two school garden pioneers offer parents, teachers, and school administrators everything they need to know to build school gardens and to develop the programs that support them.

Today both schools and parents have a unique opportunity — and an increasing responsibility — to cultivate an awareness of our finite resources, to reinforce values of environmental stewardship, to help students understand concepts of nutrition and health, and to connect children to the natural world. What better way to do this than by engaging young people, their families, and teachers in the wondrous outdoor classroom that is their very own school garden?

It's all here: developing the concept, planning, fund-raising, organizing, designing the space, preparing the site, working with parents and schools, teaching in the garden, planting, harvesting, and even cooking, with kid-friendly recipes and year-round activities. Packed with strategies, to-do lists, sample letters, detailed lesson plans, and tricks of the trade from decades of experience developing school garden programs for grades K–8, this hands-on approach will make school garden projects accessible, inexpensive, and sustainable.

Reclaiming a piece of neglected play yard and transforming it into an ecologically rich school garden is among the most beneficial activities that parents, teachers, and children can undertake together. This book provides all the tools that the school community needs to build a productive and engaging school garden that will continue to inspire and nurture students and families for years to come.

Filed under: bestsellers, children, instructional, new books, calendar, cultivation, food plants, garden design, gift ideas, health, recipes, science, sustainable, vegetables

Format: Flexibind
Pages: 224 pp.
Book dimensions: 8 x 10 in. (255 x 205 mm.)
Images: 117 color photos, 4 drawings
ISBN-10: 1604690003
ISBN-13: 9781604690002

About the authors

Arden Bucklin-Sporer

Arden Bucklin-Sporer is the executive director of the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance, an advocacy organization for school gardens and outdoor classrooms. She is the director of educational gardens for the San Francisco Unified School District, and a founding partner of Bay Tree Design, a landscape architecture firm.

Rachel Kathleen Pringle

Rachel Kathleen Pringle is programs manager for the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance, as well as the urban school garden liaison for Occidental Arts and Ecology Center's school garden teacher training program in Sonoma County. She was previously a garden educator and coordinator of a public school garden in San Francisco.