Submitted+Grants

= Herb Society of American = Project Narrative: (not to exceed 500 words, please complete on a separate sheet) Indoor Garden include: Brief description, primary goals, how educational success will be measured and future plans for the use of the garden stations.

We believe that the establishment of Public School 32K’s community garden program is an essential component in leading our students, their families and our staff into the 21st century equipped with the skills, dispositions and responsibilities of life long learners through our garden curriculum. Our aspiration is to create a thriving community garden for our entire school and neighborhood community: students, their families, and staff. Offering access to the general community will allow us to be on the forefront of the national movement of creating schools that are community centers. We want our students to be exposed to a spiraling curriculum K-5 which includes the scientific, social, cultural, economic and global impacts of agriculture in society, with a specific focus on the need for and creation of an urban edible garden.

The purpose for our grant request is to offer our community, the opportunity to participate in a hands-on applied learning experience through the creation and preservation of a school community garden center

//We want to move beyond curriculum that is a mile wide and an inch deep. Children benefit from being able to focus on one thing over a longer period of time, and develop deeper critical thinking, questioning, research, observation, and problem solving skills through a long-term topic focus. Students bring everything they learn in Social Studies, Science, Math, and Literacy each year back to this same topic and make new connections and see it in a new light. Longer-term studies also develop attention span, interest, and curiosity.//

Specifically this grant would allow us to create an indoor herb garden in our 3rd grade classrooms to enhance our outdoor raised bed edible gardening initiative. Students in third grade study plant adaptations as part of their Science standards guided by the essential question, “How are plants well suited to live in their environments?” They will come away from this unit understanding that all living things grow, take in nutrients, breathe, reproduce, and eliminate waste. Cultivating an indoor herb garden would give them a living laboratory to expand and enrich the learning taking place in our outdoor edible garden.

Students will document their observations through sketches and photography, in addition to mapping out and

- audio tour of garden - brochure and tour guides

NEEDED:
 * 1) Quote research
 * 2) assessment (curr. Map)
 * 3) follow-up