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What are school gardens without a place to sit? As a school garden educator, seating is the first thing I tackle when I go into a new school garden setting. I have quickly learned that gardens that do not accommodate seating for the whole class run poorly. When classes come out to the garden they need the same kind of structure and routine as they do when they are indoors. Having a place to sit and center before starting garden related activities is an essential step to having a successful outdoor experience.

There are many options when it comes to outdoors seating as you see below. My favorite type by far is the one we make ourselves using stumps from forestry department. I like that it is easy and free to create but I mostly love it because it allows each student to have his or her stump. Crowding on a limited seating outdoors is often a problem and inadvertently leads students squabbling over something.

Summer is the time when educators have time to take a deep breath and evaluate what worked and how we can do things differently next year. This summer put outdoor classroom on your radar when doing such an evaluation. Be sure to ask yourself if your outdoor space has the kind of seating that will make you successful in your endeavor.

-Punita Patel, Youth Educator

Gardening as an outdoor education option provides students with a purpose for their learning. Early spring, students at Mallinckrodt and Shaw VPA broadcasted lettuce seeds in their garden bed and called it a salad bowl. Well, it is looking beautiful and growing wonderfully.  

Students learned to harvest the lettuce and with the help from MU extension agent Diana Finlay they made a salad and ate it in their garden this week.

Along the way, they learned science lessons in plant lifecycle and plant parts and picked up valuable life skills such as hard work, focus, persistence, follow though and team work.

As an educator, I am overjoyed when these students describe lettuce from the garden as sweet or beg to eat raw collard greens or thoroughly weed an entire bed full of purple nettle in 15 minutes or less.

Do you have a garden at your school that is underused? Remember, it doesn’t take a lot to get started. At Gateway Greening, we have resources that can help you extend your classroom outdoors through gardening. For weekly inspiration be sure to check our quick little garden videos.

Angela Vaughn is a Second Grade Teacher at Shaw VPA Elementary. She works with her Second Graders in the garden. The following is an interview with Angela Vaughn and Gateway Greening’s Youth Educator, Punita Patel.

How did you get started with gardening at school?

About three years ago, I began working with an architecture program and we made birdhouses in the garden area. The garden just seemed so peaceful. So we would take the students out and work at the picnic benches that are there. The kids would love walking around and just observing. So when I moved to the second grade, I thought it would be a great hands-on experience for them to have a garden.

Why do you stick with it?

I feel like the students today don’t have enough one-on-one contact and communication. If you think about gardening together, you have to talk. It is not like looking at computers all-day and letting the computers think for them. They have to help each other out. There is a lot of teamwork involved in gardening.

Do you see your students doing things in the garden that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do indoors?

What I see in the garden is them working together, playing together, and being more social. They are very playful, but at the same time, they are serious and look forward to the end result. We want them to see that we are planting the seeds of academics and education in their minds. So we do a compare and contrast with that. We plant these seeds in the garden, which then grow from the earth. But then you come into the building and we plant another type of seed that stays in the mind.

What do teachers need the most in order to use the garden successfully?

More time and manpower, more volunteers. Why? We want the students to be excited about school. When I say the word “garden” or “Ms. Punita,” their faces light up as if I said we’re having candy all day, every day, for the next year. They are excited and I want them to be excited about school.

What have you done in the garden so far?

We worked with Gateway Greening’s Sweet Potato Challenge last year. The sweet potatoes that we are growing indoors right now happen to be sweet potatoes that were left over from the Sweet Potato Challenge last year! This year, we’ve planted the greens and the cabbages. I think the most exciting part for us as a school was during out PTO, we were able to share with our parents. They were so excited to receive free produce! They said “My children grew this?” Yes!

What is your best garden story?

The Sweet Potato Challenge. The children were digging for those potatoes like they were digging for gold. They were working together, and they had glowing faces. It wasn’t anything we had to go to the store and buy or return. To me, that will stay in their minds forever. They were in it to win it!

It is so very tempting to keep students indoor on these cold days. Last week, I planned mostly indoor activities fearing cold. I quickly learned that though those activities were productive and students learned, we did rob them of the experience that could have had out in nature.

This week each class was given an option to go outside in 20-degree weather or learn indoors. To my surprise 100% of students chose gardening over staying warm. Our objective was to make pumpkin observations, record data and make predictions about what was going to happen to them in spring and summer. After that students were shown how to use found natural material to create a sculpture or a mural. They could choose if they wanted to work with a team or by themselves. I can honestly say this has been the most fun garden project I have done to date! Students showed great creativity and teamwork. They were intensely focused and had so much ownership over their projects. Thank you Ms. Mittler for this idea and inspiration.

Here are some of the pictures from yesterday. Please take a look and see what happens in the garden.

The ground at Gateway Elementary was hard to dig from a long dry spell and the backfill from Pruitt Igoe buildings. I was working with 4^th grade all girls’ class and their teacher Ms. Sandra Davie. We had received a donation for three apple trees from an area nursery. Ms. Davie and I were digging with the girls and at one point we looked at each other thinking we needed a plan B. That is when one of the girls announced to us that “we love working hard”. It was true they were really enjoying the work. It was meaningful to them. Her words reaffirmed to us why learning outdoors is so important. It not only makes curricular connections but it also teaches students important life lessons along the way.

Eventually we did manage to dig holes big enough and deep enough to plant all three of our trees.

Fruits of our labor, we hope are golden and delicious.

Here Ms. Davie is marking the spot where the girls decided to plant one of their tree after considering various factors e.g. sunlight.

-Punita Patel, Youth Educator

Playing a particularly athletic morning game.

My name is Myra and I’m a recent graduate from Career Academy High School. I’m a crew member of Gateway Greening’s Dig It STL program, which is an eight week youth employment program that educates and strengthens teens while beautifying the community through urban agriculture. At Dig It we lead and assist volunteer groups and tours and learn hands on basic agriculture and construction skills to help the gardens that Gateway Greening supports. We also take field trips to other gardens and farms. The best part of all? We cook with Chefs using the food we harvest from Bell Garden. Throughout the program, I have learned, grown and networked with plants, animals and people in my community. Im honestly considering to further my education in urban farming because of my wonderful experience at Gateway Greening. Maybe one day I will own an organic farm and name it “Cotton’s Greening”.

Eating guest chef tacos (Myra on the left).

Thom leading a field trip group at the compost station.

Michael leading a field trip group in harvesting herbs.

Hello, my name is Ting Liu. This is my last week as an intern at Gateway Greening. I have spent 2 months here and gained wonderful gardening and teaching experience. In this passionate organization, people do awesome work in the city!

I am part of the Youth Program and responsible for Early Childhood Education. I deliver weekly gardening classes for three day care centers. I’ve done many interesting activities with children and given them many chances to experience their gardens.

My favorite gardening activity is to plant and transplant vegetables with kids. Kids love this hands-on class. They like to touch and smell leaves and they like to dig soil and water plants. We got many interactions through planting. It is a great way to have them communicate with nature, and it helps me understand them better.

Through the 2-month internship, my thoughts regarding gardening changed a lot. I didn’t have an opinion about gardening before. But now, I am interested in having a small and personal garden near my house. I feel excited about plants’ growth. Each time, when I got to day care centers, I couldn’t wait to check the vegetables we planted. When I found they were getting higher and bigger, I got proud of them. They are like my babies!