Details
This Woolly School Garden has been generously sponsored by: Plastics Make it Possible
General School Info: Belmont Charter School (BCS) was founded in 2002 by the Philadelphia School Reform Commission. Formerly a public school with the Philadelphia School District, BCS is unique in the fact that student enrollment is determined by a geographic catchment area, versus the typical lottery style of enrollment associated with charter schools. As such, Belmont truly is a "community" based charter school in every sense of the word. The current 1st through 8th grade program serves 430 students and has a 17:1 student to teacher ratio.
To learn more, see our school website.
Our Gardening Plan: We would like a Woolly School Garden to show our students and the neighborhood that blight, trash, and neglect does not have to be the norm. That with a little work along with light, soil, and seeds we can help rejuvinate the space. We would also like the garden for curricular reasons. We want to show our students how plants grow, how they thrive, and how we can create a sustainable garden.
How will you integrate the Woolly School Garden Program at your school? See above. PA State Standards include the life cycles of plants and thus we will easily integrate the garden into our school curriculum. In past years we have had to take trips out to gardens sometimes 30 miles away. This garden will allow us to work see plants growing and thriving in a way that is more efficient and more tangible to the kids. The garden will be on the playground wall allowing students to interact with it daily and thus create more engaging and natural learning.
How do you celebrate America Recycle's Day? We will be hosting a school wide service project to clean up the school grounds. At this event we will sort trash and help students identify materials that can be recycled. We will also use the students to help create recycle buckets throughout the school to collect recyclables. The youngest kids will create signs for both inside the school and throughout the neighborhood and school property. Along with the school wide projects, families will be sent home activity sheets to learn more about the impact of recycling.