The Berkeley Unified School District has pioneered garden education since the first school garden was planted at LeConte Elementary in 1983. This single garden inspired many others, and over the next twelve years it evolved into a multi-school Gardening and Cooking Program with annual support from a federal grant of $1.9 million from the California Nutrition Network. We lost this funding in 2013, along with many other nutrition and garden education programs, at which point we refocused from a nutrition-based program to one that supports teachers and students in the academic classroom.
This change encouraged us to develop a pilot curriculum in 2013–1014, with support from teachers, garden educators, and consultants from the Edible Schoolyard, Berkeley. Our team of experts gleaned from existing lessons and research to synthesize drafts to best fit our own school gardens. We rewrote the pilot lessons with input from our school communities and with incredible support from P. Rachel Levin, an English Language Coach, to develop academic and health targets accessible to all of our students.
The curriculum builds upon many years of educating our students in the garden and scales up content across grades and lessons for instructional scaffolding. It is designed as an interactive teaching tool to be co-taught with classroom teachers and garden instructors as leads. Each lesson connects directly to standards: Next Generation Science, Common Core State, Physical Education, and Environmental and Health Education. Our concise and easy-to-follow lessons are a packed 45 minutes for preschool through fifth grade. Flexibility is important to us, so some lessons include several activities that teachers can choose from to accommodate their lesson plans. Consistency is also important, so we follow themes and lesson structure found in the Curriculum Map.

Overview of how the Pennsylvania Common Core Standards for Mathematics are driving changes in classrooms and schools, and where resources can be found to support the implementation of those changes.

Pennsylvania Assessment Anchors and Eligible Content eBook to assist educators in preparing student for the Keystone Exams.

What To Do Before, During, & After Testing. Accommodations Guidelines produced by the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

Document Publishers’ Criteria for the CCSS in ELA/Literacy for Grades K-8 Provides criteria for publishers and curriculum developers as they work to ensure alignment of materials in grades K-8 with the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and literacy for history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. 9-pg PDF.

Students are more likely to meet Common Core expectations for reading, writing, speaking and listening, and language if they are working with texts on a regular basis. Organizing a curriculum around a series of text sets can provide those opportunities for students. This organization is supported by the PARCC Model Content Frameworks.

In this 6th grade seasonal lesson, students use teamwork to collectively press cider and learn about apples.

In this 6th grade lesson, students learn how to harvest, thresh and winnow seasonal grains and play the game, Seed to Table.

In this 6th grade science lesson, ESY staff bring visual aids and props to the classroom to teach guidelines for applying the school’s 4BEs (Be Safe, Be Respectful, Be Responsible and Be an Ally) in the garden. It is important that each student receive this lesson before they come to the garden for their first hands-on class.

In this 7th grade science lesson, students identify desirable traits in plants and take cuttings from parent plants to facilitate asexual propagation and produce offspring with identical DNA.

In this 7th grade science lesson, students review the structures and processes that allow flowering plants to reproduce, and then pick a flower from the garden to dissect and diagram.

In this 8th grade science lesson, students review the six essential elements of life and discuss how they function in the garden.

In this 6th grade Science class, students learn how to build a compost pile, learn about organisms needed for decomposition, and begin to understand the purpose of compost in the garden.

In this 6th grade science class, students consider how they use water in their daily lives and learn that water is a nonrenewable resource in a closed system.

In this 7th grade science lesson, students are introduced to the food system and play an interactive game called The Wind Blows.

In this 6th grade science lesson, students are introduced to the garden as a classroom. They meet the garden staff, tour the garden, learn the basic systems and routines of the garden classroom and are introduced to the Edible Schoolyard life skills and values.

In this 7th grade science lesson, students learn about levers and use them to make-work easier.

In this 7th grade science lesson, students deepen their understanding of pollen and pollinators by practicing the use of microscopes to observe pollen and bee species from the garden.

In this 6th grade science class, students observe mushrooms growing wild in the garden, handle examples of common edible mushrooms and learn about the lifecycle of fungi.

In this 6th grade science lesson, students learn about the prevalence of potatoes while also preparing, roasting, and eating garden potatoes from the wood-burning oven.