Inspiration
Engendering a Love of Learning
Alison Hicks is part of a committee creating a model outdoor education program at Castro School in Mountain View appropriate for public schools and particularly for those schools serving a significant number of low-income families.
Castro School's nature garden was reclaimed from a bleak stretch of asphalt and transformed into an educational asset by parent and student volunteers over the past year. The garden has three special areas that represent major California eco-systems — a chaparral, a Redwood grove, and agricultural land. Children themselves cemented cobbles to form a beautiful dry streambed. The bed is surrounded by an invented creekside landscape, a favorite for recess-time fantasy play.
In the garden is also a central “classroom” where a group of 20 students can learn science-related curriculum in a particularly engaging setting. It will be a place where children can learn about nature - plants, insects, seasons, weather, soil, and rocks — in nature instead of indoors. The garden, developed for under $10,000, plus generous donations from local businesses, is becoming a place of beauty and respite for the school and neighboring community. Another grant of $40,000 has been received to create an outdoor classroom program with an exciting curriculum for all the public schools in the district based on the model of the Castro School's garden program.
I’m particularly touched by responses of children who live in apartments without yards and often without family cars to take them out of the city. I remember working with worms with one boy. At the end of the lesson he refused to put the worm back because, he said, he loved it. I told him he could find one at home in the dirt and he said they don’t have dirt around his house, only cement.
Parents and teachers see the Castro School garden as as the spark that started the district-wide garden program. They see their garden as merely the start of a dream and hope that additional funding will help the outdoor science program grow over the years.
I think gardens have a very special place in education for the world ahead.
Alison Hicks
