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We can partner with your school to provide:
Curriculum to connect gardens to the classroom and learning standards
STEM and STEAM learning
Hands-on multi-disciplinary outdoor education
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Curriculum to connect gardens to the classroom and learning standards
STEM and STEAM learning
Hands-on multi-disciplinary outdoor education
Garden and Curriculum Experience
Laura Ruby has over 12 years of experience working with elementary and middle school teachers, admin and students in Colorado and North Carolina. She started out designing gardens for schools, including ordering plants and seeds. She quickly jumped into curriculum development, directly connecting gardens to the classrooms and curriculum standards. Soon, this evolved into working with school districts to directly tie the gardens and the outdoors with STEM and STEAM requirements. Most recently, she worked with the Roots Foundation as the Director of Curriculum, tying North Carolina Core Curriculum to real world scenarios. She worked directly with teachers to design challenges and solutions using real world scenarios and community resources guided by Project Based Learning (PLB) principles. She loves working with schools, and also works with families helping them design and create interactive outdoor learning gardens at their own homes.
Case-Study: Rain Gardens and Student-Led Inquiry
In one example, Laura, with the Roots Foundation team, worked with the Vance Elementary third grade teaching team to develop a multi-disciplinary unit centered around pollution and the French Broad River. To engage student interest, students were shown a film about the Hellbender salamander. With their interest in the salamander peaked, they were challenged to discover why this salamander was endangered. With self-guided research, they concluded that a major threat to the salamander is sedimentation. The next guiding question was ‘what causes sedimentation and what can we, as a Vance community, do to reduce sedimentation going into the French Broad River’. After studying various solutions, students decided that a rain garden was something their school community could do.
We connected students and teachers with Riverlink, a local non-profit dedicated to protecting the French Broad River. They provided resources for how to design and build rain gardens. Students then worked in teams to design a rain garden that they would install in front of their school. The designs were presented to a panel where feedback was given and a final design was created. We then had a work day and installed the garden with the students and community volunteers. This project took place over many months, touching on many math, science, literature and art lesson standards, and ended with a real life solution designed by the students.