STEM Week: Outdoor Gardening and Learning at CitySprouts
This post was first published by United Way BoSTEM, Oct. 19, 2020
A garden is a great medium for kids to learn about science. It’s an environment well-suited to hands-on learning. Growing plants makes science relevant to young people’s life. And it's a natural space for problem-solving and collaborative learning.
This fall, CitySprouts is teaming up with 3 urban farms in Dorchester, Roxbury and East Cambridge to run a “growing club” for middle school-aged youth. CitySprouts’ Youth Leadership Teams gather weekly to help farm staff with harvesting and garden chores, and meanwhile building their knowledge of life sciences.
Most of these kids also participated in CitySprouts summer program this year. With 72 youth enrolled (and a 93% retention), CitySprouts ran a remote summer program at four sites in Cambridge and two sites in Boston. CitySprouts summer program curriculum includes plant growth and propagation, urban tree canopy and climate change, carbon and water cycles and harnessing solar energy.
A key aspect of this summer’ remote adaptation was to create and send home STEM kits to all our participants. These kits included materials to start a small home garden, participate in different science and engineering projects, as well as home cooking.
CitySprouts also runs an in-person science program in 20 Boston and Cambridge schools. Using the schoolyard garden and the classroom, our Early Start in Science lessons open the door to engaging, accessible science for students of all backgrounds and abilities.
More about our in-school program can be found on our CitySprouts At Home webpage. Lastly, our educators are preparing school gardens to be centers of science learning for those students returning to in person instruction.
At CitySprouts our goal is to create equity in science learning and we believe that the garden is at the heart of that. It allows students of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities to access high quality science content from an early age.
