Environmental Projects: Community Gardening

Community gardening provides a great opportunity for kids to put their science and social skills together in a beneficial and rewarding way. By involving your kids in the development or maintenance of a community garden, you are enabling them to better understand the origins of the foods they eat, as well as to promote healthy lifestyles. Additionally, community gardens protect precious green spaces in overcrowded cityscapes, and they provide a safe space in which wildlife can thrive. Your kids will benefit from seeing their environmental education utilized in a hands-on capacity.

Environmentally-themed projects are popular choices for service-learning because they bring the classroom outdoors. Any of these ideas can be used as an independent project, but they have the greatest effect if done as a group.
 

Project Ideas:

1. Power of Seeds—Collect used two-liter soda bottles to be used as garden containers. Once cleaned and prepared, fill the containers with earth matter and compost, plant a seedling and learn how to care for and grow the plant. Have your kids take the containers and their plant home with them.

2. Rake Aerobics/Recycle Relay—Create a recycling obstacle course with your kids. While building the course children are learning about the benefits of reducing, reusing, and recycling.

3. Make Your Bed!—Have kids weed and tend a garden bed at a community garden.

4. Name Your Plants—Have kids create and decorate plant identification tags for the different vegetables in the various garden beds.

5. Painting with Soil—Encourage your kids’ creative talents by having them paint pictures using paints made from different color soils. (This project is described in greater detail in the “Supplementary Activities” section of this packet.)

6. Taste-test!—Blindfold your kids and have them taste-test fruits and vegetables from both the grocery store and a community garden or farmers’ market. See if your kids can guess which food came from which place. Additionally, you can have your kids journal about what the foods taste like; what the texture of the foods feel like; or how things smell.
 

Potential Partner Agencies:

GROW Nashville Community Gardens:
Edgehill Community Garden Inc.
Warner Park Nature Center
CE McGruder Community Garden
Farmers Market Garden
Napier School Garden
Nashville Urban Harvest
Park Avenue Community Garden
Watkins Park Community Garden
Better Tomorrows
Bellevue Community Center
TN Earth Matters
Nashville Farmers’ Market