Category Archives: Teaching

Second graders, it appears, can get the grocery shoppers in their homes to buy more fruits and vegetables, university researchers say, at least when the young students have learned a bit about nutrition in a Continue reading →

“When we address privilege and inequity, access to nature should be high on our list,” says Kate Ehrenfeld Gardoqui in The Irrefutable Case for Taking Class Outside in the current issue of Education Week. Gardoqui, a senior associate with the Great Schools Partnership and the cofounder of White Pine Programs, a nature- Continue reading →

The Vegetable Project’s fourth annual Evening in the Garden is set for Wednesday, Sept. 18, at the garden at Myers Middle School. You won’t want to miss it. The food will be great. We’ll show you around the garden. Learn from demonstrations. Bring a sample of your garden soil and we’ll measure the pH for you.

The garden is behind the school building. We’ll move inside if it rains.

We would be pleased if you would let us know that you are coming at Eventbrite or our Facebook event.

We would be grateful if you would stand up and be counted as a friend of our all-volunteer effort to create hands-on learning opportunities for Albany kids with great needs by becoming a member of the event’s honorary committee. We will include your name in an event program when you make a $25 contribution. Again, please visit Eventbrite.

Many thanks for 10 years of support. Please look for the Vegetable Project on Facebook, Instagram and Evenbrite for word of the fabulous local eateries that are contributing to this event. And please help us spread the word.

Bill Stoneman

With some concern about whether the least expensive and easiest-to-use tools are the most accurate, measuring pH and presence of macronutrients in our garden soil last week suggest that we have some work to do. Readings vary from one location to another. And trying to match colors of solutions with printed colors is more difficult than you might Continue reading →

To grow healthy kids.

To build better approaches to the kids who do not respond well to being told, “Sit still in your chair” and “Look up at the board” and “Start planning for college.”

To get kids outside.

To expose kids to thinking about what they eat.

To offer an opportunity to build foundation knowledge the way our brains really work, by making connections with what we already know, which in academic terms means across disciplines and nonlinearly.

To inspire inquiry and discovery.

To encourage a love of learning, which does not happen when accompanied with something like, “You better learn this. It’s going to be on a test on Friday.”

To connect learning to the real world.

To create experiences.

To flop the usual school approach to teaching around, by starting with interesting questions instead of a long list of facts.

Please see earlier efforts to answer the questions Why a garden? Why the Vegetable Project.

–Bill Stoneman

The Vegetable Project creates hands-on teaching and learning opportunities.

The idea is simple: We learn more and we learn more deeply when we do and touch and smell and taste and experience than when we passively receive what someone else Continue reading →

Please check out the image here that explains the difference between dirt and soil and why we shouldn’t treat one like the other. Published recently in the New York Times, it gets to the essence of one of the Vegetable Project’s favorite hands-on learning opportunities and thus the core of what the Vegetable Project is about.

We know that kids learn on a more meaningful level when we educators get Continue reading →