Spend a day looking at the garden through the eyes of a young child. Using Life Lab's Sowing the Seeds of Wonder activity guide for preschool and kindergarten, participants in this workshop sample activities designed to encourage young children to learn about the world using their senses; practice basic gardening skills with a focus on gardening with young children; discuss safe and age-appropriate garden design; and learn garden art projects and songs for preschoolers. Graduate education unit available.

Learn to use a school garden to provide a meaningful context in which students can apply their emerging skills in math and English language arts. Using lessons from The Growing Classroom activity guide, participants in this workshop will experience and discuss garden activities. Whether they are graphing the temperature of their compost pile over time; reading a recipe to make fresh salsa; writing a story from the perspective of an ant; or presenting to a buddy class on the animals that visited their sunflower patch, the opportunities for children to practice traditional academic subjects in the garden are limitless! Graduate education unit available.

Learn to facilitate engineering experiences for students in the garden! Participants will engage in a 3rd-5th grade unit designed for Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), in which students design and build trellises for peas in the school garden. We will make observations; design, build and test prototypes; and then build full-size trellises to grow peas. By unpacking this unit, we will learn how to facilitate engineering experiences that address real problems or needs in school gardens. You will leave with resources to lead this unit, and also a framework for designing your own engineering in the garden unit.

The Santa Cruz area is home to robust, long standing school food and garden programs. Join us to visit resilient school gardens and innovative scratch cooking school meal programs that are exemplary of the programming that has been running for decades.