Healthy Food + Healthy Ecosystems = Healthy Neighborhoods (A Summer Garden Program for Middle School Youth)

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Screen Shot 2014-06-13 at 11.34.00 AMMiddle schoolers can get a lot out of the school garden experience, from growing food to learning about the science underlying the natural world. At CitySprouts summer youth program in Cambridge, MA, 100 young people ages 11-13 go through a month-long summer internship program at various schoolyard garden locations. Middle school interns learn garden skills and how to care for their school garden- planting, weeding, watering and harvesting food for lunch. They go on field trips to hunger-relief organizations, grocery stores, and farms outside the city to get a bigger picture of their local food system. They also learn about the interdependent relationships that exist among parts of an ecosystem as they explore the compost, the garden soil and water catchment systems in the school garden. In this webinar for the edWeb.net Growing School Gardens community, presenters Brad Pillen and Meg Giuliano, two CitySprouts Garden Educators, presented on using school gardens in the summertime. They shared how CitySprouts connects and engages 6th-8th graders with STEM core ideas and food systems through our Out-of-School Time Service Learning Curriculum that connects to the new Next Generation-aligned standards for 6th grade ecosystems. View the webinar to learn more about summer garden programs for middle school youth.Join the Growing School Gardens community on edWeb.net and take a quiz to receive a CE Certificate for viewing this webinar. Past webinars and quizzes can be found in the Resource Library.

Growing School Gardens is a professional learning community (PLC) for educators, gardeners, parents, and community volunteers to come together to share information and resources on how to start and maintain a school garden, and integrate it into the curriculum, the life of a school, and the local community.  This program is co-hosted by edWeb.net, the Edible Schoolyard Project, the National Farm to School Network, and Life Lab.

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