Preschoolers at The Gardner School of Naperville sowed some good on Monday, planting herbs and vegetables to help with food insecurity needs.
The Gardner School partners with The GardenWorks Project
While learning about the life cycle of a seed, the kids also supported local food pantries. The herbs and vegetables grown will be donated to The GardenWorks Project and sent to local food pantries.
“Everything that we do at GardenWorks is grown to donate to a food pantry or to a family in need. And so we’re just trying to teach the kids at a very young age how to grow food and to feed people,” said Teri Wood, executive director of The GardenWorks Project.
Kids learn the life cycle of seeds
Students and their families were invited to stop by and participate after school.
“We are having the kids come over, fill up a pot with soil, pick a seed,” Wood continued. “We have seven or eight different kinds of seeds, and the goal here is to put them on a windowsill at the school. Hopefully they germinate, and they grow, and at the end of the cycle, hopefully they can plant them in their garden.”
Wood said the kids were enthusiastic about the project.
“I was pleasantly surprised that the kids weren’t afraid to get into the dirt,” Wood said. “Sometimes we find that kids don’t want to touch the dirt, but these kids were very prepared and very interested in doing that. It was interesting to see that they really wanted to grow, like, a watermelon. There was one little boy who wanted to grow a tree house, and so it’s just kind of interesting to see what they were expecting.”
Helping food insecurity in Naperville communities
Kaitlyn Rose, executive director at The Gardner School of Naperville, said the school chose to work with The GardenWorks Project because of its partnership with the community and local food pantries.
“We love to be really involved in our community. It’s super important to us, always giving back and making sure that we’re taking care of not just the families that are currently enrolled with us and part of our family, but other people that are in our community. We thought that they had a really great mission. We loved, like the things that they have done in the past, and we’re like, this is definitely something that we could also partake in and be able to get behind,” Rose said.
Students will watch the plants grow in their classrooms until they are ready to be donated.
“We’re excited to see this blossom, literally and figuratively,” Rose said.
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