Learning, like any other slice of human development, is far too complicated to explain successes or failures in terms of a single factor or two. But contact with nature appears to be a very important one. And education policymakers ought to get their hands around this, starting with a peek at voluminous research supporting this notion.
Goodness knows, sitting at desks in traditional classrooms is not working Continue reading
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Posted in Planting, School garden, Uncategorized
With this holiday season upon us, I am writing to ask you to consider making a gift to the Vegetable Project. It’s as easy as clicking here to initiate an online payment.
The Vegetable Project has been working to create hands-on teaching and learning opportunities in Albany schools since 2009. With your help, we will make touching and tasting and really doing a bigger part of students’ learning experience. We will bring more students aboard as members of our teaching team. We will develop an outdoor classroom at Myers Middle School. We will make a difference in the lives of students who are not thriving in the main school program.
With gardens at Myers Middle School and Albany High School, we lead kids outdoors to drop seeds in soil and to pull carrots and garlic out, to leave science class recitation about producers, consumers and decomposers behind as we introduce them to the real things, and to capture nature’s power to build equanimity. With produce from those gardens and sometimes just a bit of seasoning and other times real kitchen experiences, we overcome resistance to trying unfamiliar tastes. And with constraints that come with a locale that has four seasons, we build teaching and learning opportunities around hardy plants that make it through cold months in simple greenhouses and tender plants that grow under indoor lighting.
The Vegetable Project, led entirely by volunteers, does all of this and more in classrooms, after school and through paid employment of teens, during the school year and over the summer. And it does this with a particular focus on students with the great challenges in their lives, who typically pose the greatest challenges at school, who would benefit most from touching, tasting, doing and having more contact with nature.
Please learn more about the Vegetable Project at https://vegetableproject.org and https://www.facebook.com/vegetableproject. Please support our work to build hands-on teaching and learning opportunities, to reach more kids and to create an outdoor classroom at Myers that will make taking classes outside occasionally an irresistible option for teachers.
We are a 501c3 nonprofit corporation, making your contributions deductible to the extent allowable based on your specific circumstances.
Thanks very much and Happy Holidays!
–Bill Stoneman
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Posted in Compost, Contact with nature, Four-season growing, Greenhouses, Outdoor classroom, Planting, School garden, Science, Soil, Teaching, Uncategorized
We can do something in and around the garden that does not happen in the classroom often enough: capture attention with a moment of pleasant surprise. Take, for example, what happens when we offer a taste of leaves and stems from a live plant.
Some students, of course, cheerfully pop the greens in their mouths. Many Continue reading
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Posted in Contact with nature, Planting, School garden, Teaching
What exactly drives us to build gardens at Albany schools and then lead kids out to them? Why would we bother with those time-consuming fundraising initiatives, like Boxtops for Education, and those time-consuming chores in the garden, like weeding and watering? And what is the big deal about growing some of our own lettuce and tomatoes, when it’s so cheap in the supermarket?
Please see our first take at answering these questions and then another and then still one more. And here is another try.
Vegetables can be a tough sell, at least when alternatives full of sugar, salt and fat Continue reading
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Posted in Contact with nature, Planting, School garden, Teaching, Uncategorized
Contributing to the Vegetable Project is as easy as buying High Mowing Organic Seeds from us from now until Tuesday, March 20.
You can view our offering and place orders online, through farmraiser.com, which supports fundraisers built around healthy eating and local products.
Or if you would rather do business on paper, maybe so you can invite friends and family to go in on an order with you, that’s okay, too. Please click here for a printable brochure describing what we are offering. And then print an order form. Please get orders to us, with cash or a check, by Friday, March 16, so we can complete necessary handling.
Either way, the Vegetable Project receives half of all sales in our eighth annual seed sale fundraiser. You will have your seeds in time for the coming season’s planting. And you will be supporting our four-season growing and our work to create hands-on teaching and learning opportunities in Albany schools, by providing us with funds for supplies, tools and equipment.
And rather donate the full cost of seeds or more? That’s okay, too. Just click on the Donate button at our web site to make an online contribution.
High Mowing’s seeds are organic and free of genetically modified organisms, which we think is important. And based in Vermont, many of its seeds were raised in the Northeast, meaning they’re especially suited to thrive in the kind of conditions that have.
The Vegetable Project reaches out especially to kids with the greatest needs. These are kids in Albany schools who are challenging and disruptive, who do not respond well to admonitions like “sit still in your chair” and “look up at the board.” We garden, prepare tasty dishes with what we grow and teach about scientific method. But most of all we engage kids. Working at two Albany schools so far, we have four programs: a year-round after-school Garden Club at Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School, development and assistance with plant-related classroom activities and curriculum at both Myers Middle School and Albany High School, a paid garden assistant internship mentoring program for at-risk students at Albany High and a work site for a city summer jobs program that gives high school-age students a first exposure to employment.
In addition, we are building development plans for an outdoor classroom at our middle school home, with a greenhouse, a shaded sitting area, a fruit tree orchard and naturalized space where science classes would conduct meaningful scientific investigations. The completed space should be as irresistible to art or history teachers as it is to science teachers, thus increasing kids’ time outdoors in fresh air and amid greenery, which research shows supports wide ranging healthy outcomes.
Happy gardening. And please help us spread word about this great offer.
–Bill Stoneman
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Posted in Contact with nature, Greenhouses, Outdoor classroom, Planting, School garden, Science, Teaching, Uncategorized
Trying to find the right classroom formula takes considerable trial and error.
We are conducting a controlled experiment, of a sort, in a couple of high school science classes. We are seeking to determine whether we can capture the attention of seriously disaffected living environment students by significantly altering the their classroom experience. And to the extent that we can, we are seeking to determine whether teachers who are at their wit’s end will see the same progress with students that we see.
The context, which we see discouragingly often, are classes with many, many, students who show just about Continue reading
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Posted in Compost, Contact with nature, Planting, Science, Soil, Teaching, Uncategorized
The tiny specs of green in the accompanying photo, taken in the morning on Sunday, Oct. 1, are arugula seedlings. We scattered arugula seeds four days earlier, on Wednesday, Sept. 27. It’s worth noting that some seeds still germinate at this late point in the season. We are fairly confident, if not 100 percent certain, that leaves on these plants still have enough Continue reading
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Posted in Outdoor classroom, Planting, Science, Soil, Teaching, Uncategorized
Help wanted: Seeking a classroom teacher, or maybe two or three, maybe a science teacher or maybe a family and consumer science teacher, but maybe something else as well, to partner with the Vegetable Project in curating our gardens and school yards as a class project and an alternative approach to teaching and learning. More than just name plants, we Continue reading
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Posted in Planting, School garden, Science, Teaching
We spend so much of our energy growing peas and carrots and all sorts of other plants that we neglect at times to talk about a broader mission: to do our part in g
rowing healthy children. Working in schools where academic outcomes are often discouraging, we suspect that healthy, nurturing relationships with adults and educators can make a positive difference.
This thought about relationships, maybe call it mentoring, and perhaps the idea Continue reading
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Posted in Compost, Four-season growing, Planting, Teaching
At Myers Middle School.
A big challenge in school gardening in this part of the world is winter. Children are at their desks, but the soil is frozen. Thus, we are please to report great help that the Whole Kids Foundation is offering us to build a workaround.
As part of an annual school gardening Continue reading
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Posted in Four-season growing, Greenhouses, Planting, School garden, Uncategorized
Strut your stuff in a stylish Vegetable Project T-shirt for $15. It's a great way to show you support creating hands-on learning opportunities for Albany kids.