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Urban Gardens for Kids
Let’s Build a Butterfly Garden! And learn about plants and butterflies and more Second in a series of community urban gardening courses for kids
Welcome! I have designed this course on behalf of Loving Garland Green and its members to share with our community. It was created in response to requests from two inspired educators in our community: Ms. Marcie Romero, a counselor from Beaver Technology Center, and Ms. Jennifer Clements, a teacher from Watson Technology Center. These two sister schools are magnet schools located here in Garland, Texas. In the spring of 2015, in collaboration with Marcie, we taught Urban Gardens for Kids—Let’s Build a Community Garden. This was a highly successful course that was repeated for the fourth quarter of that school year. For so many reasons it is important to nurture and grow our connections and respect for nature. No better starting place than with the youngsters in our community whose optimistic enthusiasm for learning makes these classes a joy for the teachers too. This course is offered as one of the botany electives. Each quarter at these two magnet schools (K-‐5) students choose an elective course for that quarter. The class meets once a week for 45 minutes. In addition to classroom activities, the students work in the greenhouse on the school grounds. For the Butterfly Garden course Quarter 1 they will also build a butterfly garden on the school grounds. Butterfly Gardens is designed as a yearlong course: Quarter 1: Build the Garden; Quarter 2: Add Butterfly Accessories and Tend the Garden and plants in the greenhouse; Quarter 3: Get Ready for spring and the return of the Monarchs; Quarter 4: Tend the Garden and observe and report on nature observed in the garden. (All quarters will include various experiments.) The garden will continue the years after as an outdoor lab that is maintained by the students. Volunteers from the community as well as the teachers at these two schools teach these elective courses. In the Spring of 2015, for example, we had several volunteers from our community teach the various sessions of Urban Gardens for Kids—Let’s Build a Community Garden. This year it is hoped we can secure more volunteers to help us teach and also to help us prepare the Butterfly Gardens for Beaver and Watson Technology Centers. The children will do much of the work to be certain, but they will need assistance.
Elizabeth Berry
President Loving Garland Green
NOTE ON KIDS AND GARDENS If you have any doubt regarding kids enthusiasm for gardening—you should have been down at the Garland Community Garden June 3, 2015 when 110 students from the second grade class at Watson Technology Center visited the garden! Jennifer Clements, one of the teachers on this field trip reported to me that the children talked about the garden for the rest of the day. It was the focal part of their conversation. Throughout the spring of 2015, students at Beaver Tech displayed the same interest and enthusiasm for urban gardening during their class on building a community garden.