Treasure Valley students are learning about life from school gardens | Education | Idaho Statesman
Gardening with students is like reading to dogs, says Les Bois Junior High Science teacher Rob Bowman.
“There’s no danger. You really can’t go wrong out here,” he said.
“Tommy’s Garden” was built in 2007 by an Eagle Scout who got a grant from the city of Boise. It’s named for a Les Bois student who died from a drug overdose.
“We tell students, ‘We just don’t know what’s going to happen when we experiment,’ ” he said. “But really we do — in the classroom. All bets are off if you think things are going to go the way you planned in a garden.”
Many teachers in the Treasure Valley are experimenting with ways to incorporate school gardens into their curriculums, and the lessons that kids take away are as varied as the plants they grow.
It’s not just about getting kids to eat better, fresher food (though that’s part of it).
“All kinds of impressions can be made,” Bowman said. For example, one of the first flowers of spring, the tulip, is edible.
The kids ate tulip flowers, and one ate the stalk. He said it tasted like peas, Bowman said.
The eight raised beds at Les Bois have the same square footage as a classroom. The garden club does most of the maintenance, except during the summer when Bowman stops by to mow around it.
All grades use the garden, but the ninth-graders use it the most, said Bowman, who shares the garden with the reading and health teachers.
Typically, students will plant bulbs in the fall and veggies in the spring. Last year, the garden provided the plants for dissection.
“Instead of just talking about the root system of a plant, we can come out here and dig it up,” he said.
This year, Bowman wants to show the kids how to make home remedies for plants. Instead of buying fertilizer, they’re going to make it.
“I want to get it into their heads that you don’t have to go out and buy everything if you know the chemistry.”
ASCENT: GARDEN AS METAPHOR FOR LIFE
Out in the garden under a light drizzle, science specialist Lorein Oberlander shows five students what to pick and what to leave for seed.
Boise’s ASCENT program, housed near the district’s office on Victory Road, is for kids whose behavior has gotten them into serious trouble in traditional school environments.
Working together and independently, the boys chat as they collect tomatoes and beans. All five of them, ages 14-19, chose to take the gardening class, which meets daily for 40 minutes.
“They have a lot of conversations about life as they’re working on the garden ... deeper, more philosophical subjects than what’s on social media,” Oberlander said. “There’s so much responsibility out here … plants don’t lie.”
The organic garden started in the 2006-07 school year with a grant from the Juvenile Justice Commission.
Commissioners were looking for healthy alternatives for juveniles to do community service, instead of picking up trash for example, as well as a way for them to learn.
ASCENT coordinator Tracey Hocevar had read about the success of school gardens with inner city youth and wanted to give it a try.
The garden is run by teachers, a groundskeeper, volunteers from the Boise School District services office next door and summer school students.
In addition to science, Oberlander sees her students learning other skills, such as persistence, perseverance, responsibility and patience, which have been a challenge for them.
“There has been a lot of failure,” she said. “All the melons and squash died this year.”
In the spring the wind ripped the roof off the greenhouse that they use for veggie starts, and in the summer the weeds took over because the wind blew all kinds of seeds in.
But that’s how life goes sometimes, Oberlander said.
“One of the most significant things I’ve seen is the desire to experiment,” Oberlander said. “The garden is the best lab we have.”
Chris Hand, 19, likes eating the vegetables and said he could imagine having his own garden.
It’s his favorite class because it’s fun and he gets to go outside, he said.
“Sometimes it requires teamwork,” said Zeke Swanson, 15, who likes eating nasturtiums the best. “I think we’re friends now,” he said to classmate David VanHoover.
COMPASS CHARTER: CAN WE EAT THAT?
Signs in Meridian’s Compass Public Charter School garden say: Please don’t harvest crops as we use them in classes and in school lunches.
Now in his 32nd year of teaching, Howard Henning asked about having a garden even before he was hired at Compass. He had a garden in the Nampa School District where he taught previously.
Henning teaches third- through sixth-grade science at Compass.
“Every student I had got to plant something as part of science class,” he said, confessing that he’s not much of a gardener himself. “I’ve told the kids, ‘I’m learning this right along with you.’ ”
He built the first raised bed as a prototype and held student and parent work days to build eight more.
Henning mainly uses the garden to teach science process skills, such as observing, classifying, inferring and predicting.
“In the spring, when we have a lot of stuff growing, we get into germination,” he said. “How is it that weeds are so prolific? That area is loaded with puncture vine.”
The garden has made a lasting impression on some of his students.
When the radishes went to seed, Simon Orgill, 11, thought they were a new bean, so he ate one.
“It was super hot,” said Orgill, sticking his tongue out and waving his hand over it really fast. “I didn’t know radishes went to seed like that.”
The garden teaches them what works and what doesn’t work, said Luke Wollman, 10.
“Last year the watermelon, pumpkin, zucchini and cantaloupe were in the raised beds, but they took over everything,” he said.
The food they grow makes its way into school lunches whenever possible, said Wendy Long, food service director and wellness coordinator.
Last year, Henning asked her to make squash soup for the kids, and they liked it so much that she put it on the lunch menu.
She also made pumpkin cookies for the whole school.
“It shows that healthy food tastes good,” she said. “These kids aren’t afraid to try anything.”
Bethann Stewart: 377-6393
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