Our school playground is exclusively dirt and gravel and there are not many farms in our area. We also live in a dry area with not many community gardens. The problem with want to address is providing some food and plants for our classmates to take home and plant at their houses by growing them in a greenhouse on our playground.
We plan to reuse plexiglass barriers from the pandemic that are sitting in storage to build a greenhouse that will go on our playground. Students and classes will be able to use the greenhouse to grow starters and seedlings that they can then plant in the school garden or take home.
Great! Students help build the frame for the greenhouse and a large group helped out. We were able to use a lot of recycled materials and a large part of the mini-grant went to supporting two other projects in the school- 4th grade started worm composting, 1st and 2nd grades all grew sunflowers in the classrooms.
Taking a project slowly is important and that students can accomplish and learn a lot with some guidance.
The weight of the greenhouse makes it challenging to move around and it will need stained to protect it over the longer term.
I loved having students work with power tools that have never used them before! They felt empowered and trusted!
Students loved using power tools to assemble the greenhouse! We also used the plexiglass dividers (we have a lot hanging around our school from COVID) for the greenhouse.
