Growing Sustainable Children

Gardening with children is hands-on outdoor education at its finest. With abundant opportunities for experiential learning, the garden is, in many ways, an ideal classroom, and an increasing number of educational initiatives are recognising the many long- and short-term benefits that come with a gardening program for children.

Growing Sustainable Children is an indispensable resource for anyone already teaching in a gardening programme, for those starting a programme, or for anyone working with children in a garden or other outdoor setting as a homeschooler, community organiser, or friend of the earth.

The book includes a detailed age-appropriate curriculum and activity listings from nursery and kindergarten through high school, as well as a useful overview of the history of gardening education and the evolving consciousness of children.

Ronni Sands has been a Waldorf Garden Teacher at Summerfield Waldorf School and Farm near Santa Rosa, California for more than twenty years. She has also worked as a Waldorf kindergarten teacher, a market gardener, a landscaper, and a house parent for handicapped adults on a farm. Today she teaches high school students gardening, cooking, basket weaving, herbal studies, and sustainability. Her work in environmental studies and garden teaching have inspired a long line of graduates who take this work out into the world, many of whom have become gardening teachers themselves. Willow Summer has been gardening and farming since she first learned to plant a corn patch with her father at age four. After college she moved to the Bay Area where she founded the non-profit urban farming program City Slicker Farms, which grew from one empty lot garden in 2000 to seven urban farms and a Backyard Garden Building Program supplying thousands of pounds of urban-grown organic produce each year. Willow went on to start The Berkeley Basket, an urban community supported agriculture farm. In 2011 she co-authored The Essential Urban Farmer (Penguin Books; with Novella Carpenter) and received a teaching certificate from the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training with the goal of inspiring children and adults through farm and garden education.

Gardening with children is hands-on outdoor education at its finest. With abundant opportunities for experiential learning, the garden is, in many ways, an ideal classroom, and an increasing number of educational initiatives are recognising the many long- and short-term benefits that come with a gardening program for children. Growing Sustainable Children is an indispensable resource for anyone already teaching in a gardening programme, for those starting a programme, or for anyone working with children in a garden or other outdoor setting as a homeschooler, community organiser, or friend of the earth. The book includes a detailed age-appropriate curriculum and activity listings from nursery and kindergarten through high school, as well as a useful overview of the history of gardening education and the evolving consciousness of children.

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