Take a Little, Give a Lot: A Kindergarten Year in the Garden and Along the Road
By Lauren Edward, Kindergarten Teacher, Cornish Elementary School
Last spring one of my kindergartners walked past me in the school garden chewing on something. I asked her what she was eating. "A flower," she said. Where did you get it? "The garden." What do you think? "Yummy."
That is pretty much the whole argument for a school garden, and it took her about four seconds to make it. These are the same kids who will push a vegetable to the far edge of the plate at home. Out in the garden they were trying things they had never tried before, because they were more willing to try something that they or their friends had a hand in growing than something that mom or dad puts on the plate and says, "eat this, it's good for you."
What the garden gives them
We grow things a five-year-old can pick and eat standing up. One boy came out of the rows holding an ear of corn like a trophy, announcing "I'm getting corn!" to nobody in particular. Another one took a bite of something, thought about it for a long moment, and delivered his verdict: "It's a little good." I will take it.
They also start to understand where food comes from in a very practical way. They get the concept that if it's in my backyard, I don't have to get in my car and drive to the grocery store when I'm hungry for something that's nice and crunchy. And it follows them home. One of my students reported back that "we have asparagus beetles that are eating up our asparagus," which is not a sentence I expected to hear from a kindergartner.
Some of what we plant isn't for them at all. We plant in the spring so that the next year's students get to eat, and then those students plant for the students after them. That worked one year, and hopefully it will keep working. We also put in apple trees, which won't give us anything for a while. Maybe three or four years down the road we'll get apples for the school. In the meantime the kids have adopted the fence around those trees. They weave it with donated materials, and they'll go do it any time they get a free moment. One girl told me exactly why she was out there: "I'm making the fence look pretty."
What they give back
The other half of our year is Green Up, when we go out along the roads and pick up what people have left behind.
The first year, the kids were mostly just disgusted, and honestly the trash earns it. Bottles, cigarette butts, coffee cups, old juice left sitting in containers. One of my students, asked what he thought about what he'd found, summed it up in one word: "BAD!" They started saying things to each other like "yuck, this is gross, you need to take this home and put it in your trash can, or you need to bring your own cup so you don't have to buy a new one."
Here's what surprised me. After doing this a few years, they stopped just reacting to the mess and started thinking about how we were cleaning it up. Not everybody needs their own trash bag to fill, because we don't want to create more waste by cleaning up waste. That is a five-year-old noticing the actual shape of the problem, not just the litter in front of them. One way we can take care of our Earth is not to waste things, and they got there mostly on their own.
They came up with the safety rules the same way. Not to touch glass. Not to dig up the ground, that will hurt the earth. Don't go on the road, because you could get hit by a car. When I asked one of them what's different about doing Green Up instead of just learning about it, he said the difference is that when you only learn about it, "they're actually not doing it."
If you're thinking about trying this
You don't need a grant or a curriculum to start. You need a patch of dirt, a regular time on the schedule, and a willingness to let it be messy. The eating part matters more than I expected.
Nothing else we did moved kids toward vegetables the way picking one themselves did. And Green Up costs nothing but bags and permission.
The kids are our future, and this is how we make change, through the kids, building on their interests and their wonders and their respect for the earth. All of the kids love the earth. We just want them to keep loving it.
For more information, contact Lauren Edward at Cornish Elementary School, or the Equitable Climate Action Project at info@uvtpc.com or bit.ly/hopefulstories.
