Explorer's Learning Garden is all about process -- educational, emotional, environmental and social. Like all deep educational experiences, the learning experiences the garden offers reach through children’s hands into the very wiring of their brains and hearts. Gardening at Explorer is whole-body learning, offering rich, multi-sensory, three-dimensional, direct personal experience, unmitigated by media, from hands to head to heart. Work in the garden is linked to our school curriculum, state standards for learning and our charter. Most classes use garden journals to tie garden learning together.


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Social, Emotional and Community Development
For all classes, the year begins with discovery, an exploration of what lives in the garden. From that knowledge, our community develops a statement of purpose and rules for the garden. "We are gardeners who care about living things.” "We are gentle to animals. We keep our feet on the paths. We pick only our own vegetables." The garden, As a cooperative learning and working space, the garden enhances our social-emotional curriculum by requiring that students work together to get the work of gardening done.

Some classes work with "buddy" classes in the garden, a younger or older class. Gardening buddy projects have included creating a butterfly garden and writing a field guide to the garden, creating a poetry garden, and making pizza from garden products.

Academics
In the kindergarten classes, the curriculum follows a Seed to Table progression. Garden lessons explore dirt, worms, and seeds through hands-on learning, literature, writing and drawing. Students measure and plant square-foot garden plots. They measure their growing plants, write and draw, and harvest and cook their veggies.

First graders meet state standards in the garden by comparing the process of growing food in the past, present and future. Lessons use literature to explore the tools and processes of bringing food to market. Students also sprout grains, grind wheat to flour, and bake bread. Garden field trips have included trips to farms, grocery stores and restaurants.

Second graders plant ancestral gardens as part of a year long project studying family history. They plant seeds and grow vegetables from the continents of their ancestors, then cook using traditional recipes. Students also learn that hunger often drives immigration. This year, students will plant a community service plot to donate to a food bank.

Third graders studying local history and geography have planted a Native/Kumeyaay garden. Each of the 23 native plants was used by the Kumeyaay in some way. Students write and illustrate reports on one plant, visit an Indian museum, do community service by replanting a local canyon with native plants, and learn about the low water requirements of native plants.

Fourth graders planted a California Mission herb garden, with herbs found in the original Mission gardens. They then created herbal products such as a liniment from olive oil, beeswax and mint.

Fifth graders studying colonial history plant dye plants such as red sorrel, yellow onions, marigold, beets and purple cabbage. They learn about how cloth was created from the materials available to colonists -- wool, cotton and flax. They try dyeing cloth with grated cabbage and beets, and make sachets using lavender and mint.

Environmental Stewardship
The more exposure students have to the thriving life of the garden, the more they think about how their actions affect the environment. Everything in nature is available to see in our small space – from compost to sprouts, to veggies back to compost. Students can see how it all fits together, and how their actions impact everything. It is quite a place to study ethics!

One day, a class of second graders was in the garden when a Monarch butterfly, attracted by our thriving milkweed, swooped into the web of our big, Golden Garden Spider. A debate ensued. Should we save it? We watched it struggle for awhile. It made for a great discussion. What was the right thing to do? How will our actions affect the situation? That's what environmental stewardship is all about -- understanding the consequences of our actions.

Healthy Lifestyle
In addition to seed-to-table projects in K - 2nd grade, which involve cooking, one plot this year will supply our lunch food service with lettuce. We are working with a small, local caterer who supplies our hot lunches each day, and he is very interested in having fresh greens available for use. Students will be able to see the connection between what they grow in the garden and what they eat every day.

Unlike some gardens for children, Explorer’s garden is not for show. It’s not landscaped to perfection by a team of adult architects who are trying to create something “with children in mind.” It is a garden for doing. The product of the garden, at any given time may be abundant, or, on the surface, barren. But in the garden we learn to look deeply at the small things, things people generally pass over and ignore, and we watch the process as life springs up, unfolds and blooms. Our garden is a natural system, and we learn from it all -- from the soil, bacteria and fungus, the insects, worms and squirrels the weeds, seeds, sprouts and blossoms. In the garden we learn that we are one part of a beautiful whole, both mighty and minute, and everything contributes to that whole.