HealthMarkets Supports REAL School Gardens
HealthMarkets is pleased to support REAL School Gardens, a North Texas nonprofit organization that creates learning gardens and trains educators at high-poverty elementary schools to boost academic achievement, promote healthy lifestyles, cultivate pro-social skills and behaviors, and foster environmental stewardship.
Through the REAL School Gardens program, students and teachers have a hands-on opportunity to engage in subjects from life sciences to language arts. Even the youngest students can use the gardens to explore colors, patterns, and other foundational concepts. The gardens present a host of other lessons for students in higher grades: practical math problems such as measuring area and perimeter for planting and graphing growth, observing and learning the life cycles of flowering plants insects in the garden as well as developing strong writing skills.
The REAL School Gardens program is a true collaborative effort. Each learning garden is planned with the community, so each garden reflects the community’s interests, goals, and priorities. The school gardens who grow out of this inclusive process are handicapped accessible and sustainable and include shade, crushed granite pathways, shade arbors, earth science stations, wildlife habitats, organic vegetable beds, and a host of other features useful for teaching and learning across the curriculum. After the garden installation, the organization also provides a high-touch educator training program to each of its school partners as well as plant materials, specialized training and a stipend for each school’s garden coordinator, and expertise on an ongoing basis. REAL School Gardens currently supports 81 schools across five urban school districts in North Texas, ensuring that more than 45,000 children and over 2,700 educators have daily access to outdoor learning in school gardens. Through their focus on sustainability, the schools, students and community they touch can be impacted for a lifetime.
HealthMarkets is proud to support REAL School gardens in their efforts to create learning gardens that raise hope, spark imaginations and connect children to nature.
For more information on REAL School Gardens, please visit www.realschoolgardens.org.