Curriculum Exemplar: Community Gardening Project

Bellows Falls: A Community Learning to Help Itself

Community Works Journal's Susan Bonthron interviewed Principal Catherine Davignon and Librarian Kathy Michel, along with other staff at Bellows Falls Central (K-4) Elementary School, to find out about their service-learning curriculum.
The school sponsored a course taught through Antioch, called "Ecological Literacy." Teachers could take the class for graduate or certification credit, and over 90 percent of the teachers participated, including teachers from the local Middle School as well. The elementary teachers wanted to elaborate on what they learned from the course, which inspired them to do more work with journals and tie their activities to the curriculum. They began to look at the school yard and think about ways to improve it. With the help of two teachers from Antioch, they wrote and received a three-year $27,000 Learn & Serve grant. One of the Antioch teachers was hired as facilitator to be in charge of the administrative end, acting as school-community coordinator and helping with the time- consuming paperwork. The facilitator brought in AmeriCorps members from the Vermont Anti-Hunger Corps who helped students to create worm-farms for composting food scraps and to build grow-labs at school.


Eventually a group of six elementary teachers from the Central School and interested parents decided they could facilitate the project themselves and use the money they would have spent on a facilitator to support new and on-going projects. Teachers Sarah Massucco, Kathy Michel, Jeanne Heslop, Christine Cohun, Wendy Harty, and Carla West formed the "Learn & Serve Committee," and this group has coordinated garden and service projects at the school ever since refusing, despite the Principal's urging, to use any of the money for stipends for themselves. They offered mini-grants to teachers to help support gardening or food projects, and they are developing curriculum kits that can eventually be used in any classroom. Having asked teachers for their input about what they need, the Learn & Serve committee is now in the process of collecting materials for the kits. "Our activities were always connected to the curriculum," says first grade teacher Jeanne Heslop. Through the Learn & Serve program to date, the children have engaged in activities such as writing and delivering posters and public service announcements, maintaining grow labs, and contributing their produce and service to community beautification, Our Place food shelf, and to local citizens in need.
The Hunger Banquet
"...At the green table the only thing you got was one saltine. At the orange table you got to eat a half of an untoasted bagel and a glass of water... At the blue table, you got chicken noodle soup, half of a grinder, grapes, crackers, potato chips and a Ben & Jerry's Peace Pop.
Only two people got to sit at the blue table. I was one of them. At first, I felt pretty good to be there, but after I saw what other people had, and they started getting jealous, I felt very guilty... I got to pig out and the others got practically nothing. What I'm trying to say is that some people have more than they need, and some have much less, so please donate your time, energy, food, anything to help needy people. Sincerely, Erin Ryan, grade 4, Bellows Falls Central Elementary

All of these activities are related to an on-going school-wide theme of "Food for All,"
which combines curriculum related to gardening, food and nutrition, and community
service into an integrated whole.
The Academic Connections Are Clear: Children write stories about their gardening activities in their journals, study plant propagation and life cycles, start seedlings, raise and transplant many varieties of vegetables and flowers, draw pictures of the plants, use math to plot the perimeters of garden spaces and to estimate the number of seeds needed, and learn about cooking and nutrition. Cross-grade-level "Food for All" activities were planned to span three half days, during which children were divided into teams that rotated through cooking, gardening, and nutrition games and activities. One teacher used some mini-grant money to help her students select and purchase groceries for a needy citizen whom they interviewed. They used a supermarket flyer to estimate costs and determine how much they could spend, and they chose nutritious foods from each group of the food pyramid. This teacher presented her curriculum in a support group meeting to help teachers understand the Vermont standards

Garden Supper: Our Success Story
On the evening of March 21st, parents, children, teachers and community members came together and enjoyed a delicious spaghetti supper...The tomatoes for the sauce came from our last year's school garden, as did the basil used in the pesto. Lettuce and spinach for the salad bar were grown in classroom Grow-labs by kindergarten children, and many teachers helped children prepare vegetables in their classrooms for the salad bar. The gym cafeteria was decorated beautifully with murals made by all the different classes in the school.

. The garden supper served as a means to provide families with a delicious dinner at a very low cost, as well as an evening out with other families. We spoke at some length about our hopes for the garden project this summer and recruited quite a few volunteers for maintaining the vegetable garden. Many people worked very hard at organization and preparation for the meal, and a lot of those helping were parents who can't volunteer at regular school-day activities because of work schedules..
. . This was a very positive school/community joint effort. There didn't seem to be one negative aspect of the dinner, from planning to preparation to clean-up. We are still getting positive feedback and we hope we will be able to make this an annual event!
The Service-Learning Committee, Bellows Falls Central Elementary School

Everything "required by the new Vermont Framework of Standards sponsored by the Department of Education is fostered by this grant," according to Catherine Davignon.

In many different joint efforts the students have worked with community groups for the improvement of the school and the town. Students worked with "Our Town Beautification Committee," planting flowers in barrels downtown, building window boxes for the town library, and planting around a local nursing home.

Other local businesses and groups contributed support as well. Halliday's Greenhouse has contributed plants and offered free "Kid's Gardening Workshops" during which students learned how seeds grow, planted their own herb gardens and terrariums, planted trees, created "Gardening Day" shirts, painted flower pots, and played garden games. Children from the third and fourth grades went to Harlow Farms, a local organic farm business, where they were allowed to harvest all the squash, beets, and carrots they could stagger away with and delivered them to Our Place, the local food shelf. In keeping with the "Food for All" theme, fourth graders attended a hunger banquet, where they learned and wrote about what it was like to have scant food when others had more than they could eat. There have been many work days in which students and community volunteers planted, weeded, or put gardens to bed as the seasons demanded. In spite of repeated bouts of vandalism that caused great disappointment and concern in the school and community, the students and adult volunteers managed to put on a "Spring Gardening Kick-Off Dinner," a joint school-community effort that featured spaghetti sauce made from the previous year's garden and lettuce and vegetables grown in the classroom grow labs.

Parent volunteers play an increasingly larger role in Central's education programs. Formerly a slightly seedy, run down looking school with little or no parental involvement, Central Elementary School has become a cheerful place that the community and students are proud of, surrounded by gardens, and displaying window boxes full of bright flowers and bird feeders made by students with the help of adult volunteers. Art teacher Christine Cohun's students are creating a mural that will grace the back wall of the school playground, and she reports that they are very proud of what they are contributing. The mural will go up near a collection of huge chimes sculptured from old playground equipment, which emit perfectly pitched gong tones when they are lifted and allowed to fall against rubber pads attached to the wall. "When you look at the school," says Jeanne Heslop, "and see how much better it looks the vegetable garden, the flowers, the window boxes you can't argue with it. It works."