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Project Title: A Grandiose Garden

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A Grandiose Garden

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"The garden at Stonewall Jackson Elementary, a public school in East Dallas, began almost 15 years ago with a simple goal-use a garden to teach children about the life cycle of plants. A small pot of beans planted in the corner of the school yard captured student imaginations and cultivated their curiosity. As they learned, the garden grew.

Today, the original plot has evolved into a 20,000 square foot garden, a beautiful oasis in an urban neighborhood. Rows of student vegetable crops line up next to school buildings along a very busy street. Native wildflowers bloom in the Texas sun. A chicken coop houses a handful of hens. Seedlings sprout in the greenhouse.

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But this lovely bit of nature is also much more. The garden is a key educational tool, a hands-on learning lab where every Stonewall student learns by doing in a multisensory outdoor classroom that teaches science, connects children to nature, and helps them grow as learners.

All of our more than 575 students regularly attend garden class, where they learn from a rich academic program that involves tending the garden, science experiments, and ongoing explorations of the complex working of a diverse ecosystem. Over the past decade thousands of students have planted, cultivated, and harvested their own crops, growing their understanding of and connection to the natural world.

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The garden program is apart of every Stonewall student's experience. In a weekly class co-taught by garden instructor Mark Painter and the students' classroom teacher, students follow a routine that engages them in observing an ecosystem and how it changes over the season. The routine includes:

Tending their personal plant (one for each student at the school, yes, all 550 students!) and measuring it's growth from planting 'til harvest
Recording temperatures for the air, ground, and pond water
Recording the week's precipitation (5 rain gauges records the rain data for each grade's day in the garden)
Writing their data and their observations in their garden journal

Students are encouraged to make their own observations of the ecosystem, such as the arrival of insects or the plants reaction to the sudden change in weather. Mr. Painter and the teachers also point out interesting activity in the garden, often allowing a pest issue or other problems to continue in order to discuss the way elements of the ecosystem interrelate, such as aphids and lady beetles. The wildscape is a rich landscape for such observations, as it brings many new organisms to the garden, from butterflies to hummingbirds to lizards.

Each activity, every change, even every gardener's challenge (too little rain, insects devouring a crop, etc.) is an opportunity to discuss what is happening and draw conclusions.

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The Stonewall Garden began and continues today as a tool for teaching the world around us. Planted initially to give students a real life look at the life cycle of plants, the garden program today covers virtually all of the Texas science standards (TEKS). This hands-on outdoor lab help students to understand the synergistic systems of the Earth-structures, processes, cycles, and energy flow.

The program works for all students at Stonewall because it maintains a routine for observation while over time going deeper into key concepts. Kindergardeners talk about the differences between living and non-living things, while 5th graders discuss the role of energy transfer in a food web. And throughout, students learn by doing: the carbon cycle is understood as plant materials thrown into the compost pile in spring have become soil by the next school year. These science lessons reinforce classroom science lessons, and vice versa, through a collaborative approach between Mr. Painter and the classroom teachers.

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Teachers also use the garden as a spring board for other lessons. Venn diagrams are taught by comparing the physical features of the Stonewall chickens. Creative writing is launched after witnessing the arrival of butterflies in the wildscape. The garden is a resource as well as a classroom, and teachers often use a walk through the garden to "re-boot" their students imaginations after a long period of sitting in the classroom.

The Stonewall Garden is a jewel in which all who encounter it learn something new."

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