The University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences launch a fresh online resourcefulness for Georgia teacher looking to take full vantage of their school ’s gardens or start a garden at their schoolhouse .
Hundreds of schools in Georgia now have schoolhouse gardens , and October — Farm to School Month — is a majuscule time to use the gardens to avail students connect classroom lessons and the rude world .
TheUGA Extension School Garden Resource Center , launch Oct. 1 , 2013 , offers teacher kindergarten through eighth grade moral plan that use schoolhouse garden to instruct the course of study prescribed in the Georgia Performance Standards . All of the cognitive content at the School Garden Resource Center is spare and availableonline .
David Knauft , a professor of horticulture at UGA , collected and accommodate the schooltime garden lesson plans to make it easier for teacher to employ their schoolhouse gardens or to start new garden . During his research , Knauft found many instructor did n’t feel they had fourth dimension to work gardening into their teaching mean solar day and did n’t have the funding they needed to maintain the gardens .
“ We lead four focus group with teacher , administrators and volunteers across Georgia , asking them about the time value of the garden and what we could do to help , ” Knauft aver . “ They read that providing information to serve set up and arise their gardens and how to work them into the existing curriculum , so that they could more easily use the gardens , would make a grown difference . ”
Knauft , who has taught gardening at the UGA CAES for more than three decades , first learned the importance of linking enrichment activities with Department of State - mandate curriculum when he help develop Project Focus , an simple and middle school programme in which college students behave program - based science programs in local classrooms . Knauft collected and adapted the school garden lesson plans and other resources with the supporter of Alicia Holloway , a former agriculture instructor who is now work on the school - garden project .
“ There ’s a lot of pressure for teacher to better test scores , so it can be toilsome to take clock time away from instruction to take a course out of doors , but if you could tie that meter outside to the program and apply the school ’s garden to teach them the standards that they need to learn , it starts to make sentience , ” Holloway enunciate . “ Hopefully , teachers will be able to go to this web site , look at the lesson plan resources that are available and find one that make for good for teaching the standards that they need to focus on , while introducing students to the natural world . ”
Kaiser Permanente ’s Partnership for a Healthier America funded part of the School Garden Resource Center and will help develop more standards - based moral plans that can be used in Georgia ’s school gardens .
In addition to the example design , the School Garden Resource Center has a comprehensive guide on how to start and maintain a schooltime garden and lists subsidization and funding sources for schooltime and residential area gardens . The resourcefulness center is a one - stop consonant - store for resources from other state Extension agencies , the USDA and non - profit arrangement that promote gardening in shoal .
