An outdoor garden program at Louise Van Meter Elementary School in Los Gatos is helping students learn about the outdoors and connect with nature – and also eat their vegetables.
The program started around 2016 in some existing garden beds that had gone unused until a handful of parent volunteers and teachers came together to plant them. But the program flourished when students returned to the classroom after the pandemic, when hands-on, in-person learning became more important for elementary school students.
The program now provides a garden bed for each classroom at the school and a parent volunteer who is trained in managing the beds. Classes will come together to plant seeds for vegetables like spinach, turnips and radishes, and then will harvest their vegetables at the end of each season, said parent volunteer Pam Bond.
“Getting their hands dirty and interacting with the space, I think it just sparks a lot of joy,” fifth-grade teacher Sophia Richards said. “They’re just highly engaged, and their recall for those moments creates those core memories attached to their learning; it’s just far more impactful than if I’m just preaching in the classroom.”
Bond said some teachers have used the garden space for specific projects beyond just working in the garden, which includes an area for outdoor learning with tree stumps instead of desks.
Richards said she has used the space for project-based learning, a style of teaching that helps students connect classroom lessons with hands-on experience. That has recently included plans to develop a rainwater collection system for the garden or a student-led composting program.
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It works “even as an outdoor classroom space where teachers can take their kids out just to nature journal or if they’re learning about the life cycle, being observers in that space rather than it just being planting and harvesting,” Richards said.
Interim principal Jenny Anderson said she has seen how the garden is a safe space for students who are looking for a quiet place to escape during the excitement of lunch or recess.
“This is just an additional place on our campus [where] they can be more relaxed and not necessarily need that intensity of sport or getting balls thrown at their head,” Anderson said.
Richards said she has seen how the garden has encouraged her students to try new vegetables that they wouldn’t normally be interested in.
“They realize that they actually really enjoy eating vegetables and they’re really curious,” she said.
The Van Meter Home and School Club received $10,000 in September from the town of Los Gatos’s community grant program, and club president Hillari Zighelboim said they plan to use the funds to help fix some of the chronic irrigation problems the garden faces or put up fencing to protect plants from the wild peacocks that roam the neighborhood.
As the program continues to find its groove, parent volunteers and teachers said they hope to put together an on-campus farmers’ market where they could distribute the surplus of vegetables at the end of each season.
“It would also, future wise, just be really great to see it become this closed loop system where we could actually grow food and integrate it into the cafeteria,” Richards said.
