Aligning Elementary School Garden Curricula to Education Standards

Abstract

Garden education programs have the academic documentation to prove that they are a creative, viable, and successful way to enhance learning. However, a key limitation to using gardens for learning is the lack of garden learning resources correlated to applicable science standards. The purpose of this project was to review and analyze the literature to determine the impacts of garden-based learning on students, obtain an understanding of the prevalence of school gardens in the state of North Carolina, and determine what tools elementary school teachers need to improve the access to and efficacy of school gardens for their classes. Based on this research and on input from my client, NC Cooperative Extension, I correlated four reputable garden-based curricula to the NC Science Essential Standards and produced a database that allows North Carolina educators to identify individual lessons within the curricula that are directly aligned with specific science standards.