Gateway Greening Garden Class Volunteer
Information & Guidelines
Garden Class Program
What is Gateway Greening’s Garden Class?
Garden Class is an effort started in 2013 by Gateway Greening and SLPS to get students learning outdoors for an hour every week. Each participating school gets a dedicated Gateway Greening educator, who teaches garden-based science and other subjects. Classes have set times every week for the whole year—for example, 2nd grade comes out to the garden every Wednesday at 2pm.
What are the benefits of Garden Class for students?
- Hands-on instruction in core curriculum helps students to better retain classroom teaching
- Increases student willingness to try fresh vegetables & fruits
- Gives students a sense of responsibility and care over other living things
- Cultivates students’ social and emotional skills, through sharing tools, cooperating on tasks, taking turns, and learning to express disagreement respectfully
- Introduces students to the joy of growing and eating healthy food!
How do we utilize volunteers?
Volunteers are critical to the success of our Garden Class programming. They help to provide the individual and small-group learning opportunities that appear in the garden, and assist with classroom management. They also bring their own unique skills—if a volunteer is an artist, a musician, or knows a lot about birds, for example, we love working to incorporate those strengths into our garden classes.
- We prefer that volunteers commit to consistently volunteering with the same classes for at least an entire season (Fall or Spring). For example, you could volunteer with 2nd grade at 2pm every Wednesday from August-October. Some volunteers choose to assist the Gateway Greening educator for an entire teaching day every week—from about 10am to 3pm. However, we are flexible.
- To get more information on class schedules, and to set up a time to volunteer, contact us!
- Carolyn Cosgrove Payne – (763) 227-1450 (Clay Elementary)
- Punita Patel – (314) 560-8823 (Mallinckrodt & Cote Brilliante Elementary)
- If you are unable to make it, please make sure to call and cancel
- If you ‘no-call, no-show’ 2 times, you will no longer be eligible to volunteer with school gardens.