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
Connecting with nature for equity and rigor
“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
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Won’t want to miss Evening in the Garden
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
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Using scientific tools for bigger lessons
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
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Why a garden? Why the Vegetable Project? #5
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
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Garlic scape season arrives in local gardens
If mainstream grocery stores shape your understanding of food, you may not be familiar with garlic scapes. Backyard growers and shoppers at occasional earthier grocers, such as the Honest Weight Food Coop, however, look forward the moment when hardneck garlic plants are ready to yield their scapes. We cut ours down this year on July 2 at Myers Middle School, a week or so later than some years.
Many thanks to old friend Lorraine Doyno Evans for passing along this recipe for garlic scape pesto from Fruition Seeds in Naples, N.Y.
Raising garlic, of course, is about much more than adding a dash of taste to what you eat for the Vegetable Project. It’s a part of harnessesing the power of exposure to nature, such as by gently encouraging getting hands dirty, to give a hand to Albany kids with great needs. We create opportunities for at-risk high school students with paid internships to do real business with adults. We give teens first jobs during the summer, set high expectations and help the teens meet those expectations. We partner with classroom teachers where the going is tough.
These efforts take resources of the human and financial kinds. Please click here https://vegetableproject.org/about-us-2/many-ways-to-participate-and-contribute/ to learn more about the many ways to participate and contribute.
–Bill Stoneman
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Teaching and learning with hands on subject
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
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Treating our garden soil like dirt
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
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Working for kids in Albany schools
Another school year is winding down. Another growing season is shaping up. And the Vegetable Project continues to build hands-on learning opportunities, seeking more than anything else to make a difference in the lives of kids with great needs.
We know from our own experience and from voluminous scholarly research that contact with nature can be a force for good health – physical, mental and emotional – and thus support vital outcomes that range from sense of purpose to Continue reading
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Taking nature seriously in education
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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