Tucked away in her home in Fredericksburg Academy’s Lower School STEAM Lab, a Russian desert tortoise named Yoshi regularly enjoys a unique farm-to-table feast, as students excitedly share freshly picked green leaf lettuce and observe how eagerly the object of their affection devours this home-grown treat.

 

The harvest comes from the hydroponic gardens glowing and growing in all of FA’s Lower School and preschool classrooms. Hydroponics, the method of growing plants in a water-based nutrient solution instead of soil, is the latest strategic investment by FA to enrich and enhance the Lower School student learning experience.

 

Last year, the Pre-K-12 school located in Spotsylvania County won a grant from Green Our Planet, an international organization focused on helping teachers use school gardens and hydroponic laboratories to teach STEM, conservation, nutrition and entrepreneurship. The grant funded the hydroponic beds and lights, seed pods and nutrient mix. Teachers gained access to a catalog of resources to help them build cross-curricular lessons around the indoor gardens.

 

The hydroponic beds are one piece of a strong focus FA places on experiential and nature-based learning. Fredericksburg Academy is a certified by the Association for Nature-Based Education as a nature-based elementary school.

 

A typical day of learning can include story walks through the wooded trails on FA’s 44-acre campus, active recesses, outdoor reading and music time, collecting water samples for scientific research and many other activities. Small classes capped between 16-18 students enable faculty to give individual attention to each child, and also to be nimble enough to execute creative ideas when the see an opportunity to enhance the learning experience.

 

“Going outside is an integral part of the school day at every grade level at FA,” said Patty Estes, Head of FA’s Lower School. “While we can go outside and see nature, we also want it to be part of the entire school experience. This was an ideal opportunity for us to bring nature into the classroom so students can observe it all day every day.”

 

In the weeks leading up to Halloween, Beth Raust and Sue Bain’s kindergarteners were sprouting pumpkin seeds in a hands-on lesson about the gourd’s life cycle. In Kelly Hogan and Tess Wunderlich’s junior kindergarten class, students planted multiple seed species and then hypothesized how each would grow, learning about units of measurement and observation as they collected data on which plants grew the fastest and tallest.

 

The passion for outdoors-based learning has grown as the school has added more nature-based initiatives. This past summer, several Lower School teachers attended training with Virginia Agriculture in the Classroom, and are now leading students through the process of building sensory gardens on campus. Kindergarten teacher Emalee Owens is excited for her class to build a music wall using everyday objects on one side of the playscape. Under her guidance, students are selecting aromatic herbs like lavender and chocolate mint to plant in the spring to establish a collective early childhood sensory garden, planned, planted, and tended by early childhood children for the purpose of engaging the senses of touch, sight, smell, and taste.

 

“I have seen such a difference in the kids because they are able to spend time outside,” she said. “Being outdoors awakens the inquisitive nature of children, and almost everything becomes a lesson. Just this morning one of my students asked, ‘Do bees have blood?’ and I said, ‘Let’s find a way to learn the answer.’”

 

According to the Natural Learning Initiative at North Carolina State University, U.S. studies show that schools using outdoor classrooms and other forms of nature-based experiential education support significant student gains in social studies, science, language arts and math. Students in outdoor science programs improved science testing scores by 27%.

 

But the academic gains are only part of the benefit FA is chasing with its focus on the outdoors. Teachers recount the intangible assets students are also building, soft skills like problem-solving and collaboratively overcoming challenges, such as figuring out how to build a barrier that can protect a growing garden from outdoor recess play.

 

“Just as we are focused on preparing students academically for the world that awaits, we also want them to be ready to care for that world, to be caretakers,” Estes said. “I’ve always believed that everything we need to teach can be taught in a garden, and I am so proud of the way our faculty are embracing this opportunity for their students. The impact of this indoor garden program will continue to grow with each planting, as will our community of Lower School gardeners.”

 

To learn more, visit fredericksburgacademy.org.