Growing Sustainable Children: A Garden Teacher's Guide

Gardening with children is hands-on, outdoor education at its finest. With abundant opportunities for experientiallearning, the garden is, in many ways, an ideal classroom, and an increasingnumber of educational initiatives are recognizing the multifaceted long- andshort-term benefits that come with a gardening program for children.

With its useful overviews of thehistory of gardening education and the evolving consciousness of children, andits detailed age-appropriate curriculum and activity listings from nursery andkindergarten through high school, thisbook will be an indispensable resource for anyone alreadyteaching in a gardening program, for those planning on starting such a program, or for anyone working with children in a garden or other outdoor setting as ahomeschooler, community organizer, or friend of the Earth.

Ronni Sands has been teachinggardening to children and adolescents for more than twenty-five years, and throughher rich experience she has created the curriculum presented here, one that isalso based on the picture of child development used in Waldorf schools. Thecurriculum builds on itself through the grades, adding new skills, concepts, and abilities year after year. As she writes in the Introduction:

"We are facing an environmentalcrisis. Crisis is good because it brings us to consciousness.... What we givetime to becomes important. Having a regular time of the day when children workwith and experience nature represents a path out of this crisis. To have alasting impact, ecological principles must be woven into all aspects ofeducation as experiences as well as concepts. Big or small, urban or rural, aspace for a garden can lead children back to the natural world. If we want ourchildren to have access to the many resources in nature, we must educate themto love and preserve these resources. This is the first step in building aheart-felt relationship to nature and growing 'sustainable children.'"