Across America, there has been a burgeoning school-garden movement for several years. But the national standout is a Fort Worth nonprofit called REAL School Gardens, created six years ago and backed by billionaire financier Richard Rainwater, according to the Dallas Morning News. The idea behind the REAL gardens is to enhance learning by immersing kids in the natural world. David Sobel, an education specialist at Antioch University New England, says there is “a lot of good research” showing that a garden well-integrated into a curriculum can increase students’ test scores. So far, REAL has funded learning gardens at 66 Texas schools with high numbers of low-income students. It spend $7,500 to $25,000 to install the gardens, then also provides money to cover maintenance and a teaching coordinator. The Morning News story focused on the Robert E. Lee Elementary School, one of four Dallas schools to received a REAL grant this academic year. “We get a lot of math and science lessons coming out of this,” Alicia Zapata, principal, told the paper. For example, students in the higher grades use math skills to calculate area and perimeter. And its students have also been studying the lifecycles of birds and butterflies. Clearly, it’s a great mix of green thumbs and gray matter.

K-12 Education News

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Tags: Environmental science