By Cathy Spaulding
Sunny skies brought students from Tony Goetz and Irving elementary schools out to work in their gardens Wednesday morning.
Each school received a grant to help its gardens — and its students — grow.
Irving’s “Growing Healthy Minds and Bodies” project is funded by a $1,248 grant from Oklahoma Natural Gas and the Education Foundation of Muskogee. With the grant, the school built raised gardens, enabling students to grow and eat their own fruits and vegetables.
Tony Goetz Elementary is upgrading its Susan Chaffin Outdoor Classroom with an amphitheater and gardens funded by a $44,764 grant from the 2009 Jimmie Johnson Foundation/Lowe’s Toolbox for Education Champions program.
Armed with hand-rakes, trowels and work-gloves, Irving second-graders hit the dirt early Wednesday to plant all sorts of vegetables, fruits, even a few marigolds.
Students won’t just sit back and watch their plants grow. Someday, school officials hope, the students will eat the produce.
“Our students are really excited about being able to grow their own fruits and vegetables and tend to them as we go,” said Irving second-grade teacher Shelley Cooper.
She said students planted a dwarf peach tree along with beds of cauliflower, broccoli, spinach, cabbage and lettuce. They even planted yellow and orange marigolds among the veggies to help keep harmful bugs away, she said. Marigolds are said to emit a smell bugs don’t like.
Cooper said students will plant strawberries later this spring.
Muskogee Public Schools science coordinator Cheryll Hallum helped the students with the gardening and taught them about the plant cycle.
Irving Principal David Shouse said the garden looks amazing.
And the kids are going to get a life lesson,” Shouse said. “This is something they will remember more than reading something in a book.”
At Tony Goetz, students of various grade levels pitched in to clean old garden beds and set up a new one.
Jennifer Hunter’s kindergartners had their hands full, digging up old roots as big as themselves and evening out the soil with specially-made kids’ diggers. All work stopped whenever a student found an earthworm or slug and showed it to classmates before returning it to the earth.
Meanwhile, first-graders gathered around workers from Condley Landscaping as they planted a new tree.
In front, third-graders cleared the flower bed around the school’s stone entrance.
And the work is not yet done. Tony Goetz Principal Malinda Lindsey said classes will work on their own gardens for days, even weeks to come.
The school’s Susan Chaffin Outdoor Classroom is named for a Tony Goetz fifth-grade teacher who died of cancer in 1999.
“This is our Bringing Literature to Life Grant,” she said. “Mrs. Hunter’s class is doing a butterfly garden based on ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar.’ Fourth-graders are doing a blueberry pot based on ‘Blueberries for Sal.’”
Volunteers from Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse spent the week building a wood base for the amphitheater, which could be finished this week, Lindsey said. The grant also funded a science library.
“The kids are excited to do this,” she said. “Just after school one of the students said, ‘How did the garden go,’ and students were looking at it all day.”
Reach Cathy Spaulding at 918-684-2928 or Click Here to Send Email
