The importance of encouraging our children in outdoor work with living plants has to been recognized by GIS. Gardening in schools can be a fun and effective teaching tool. It gives students hands-on, real-world experiences and can be used to teach a variety of subjects across the curriculum. From flowers to vegetables, students will be excited to learn in an outdoor garden classroom.

Planning a Garden

This year we have started towards promoting this idea and to bring this dream to come true. We Science club members organized meetings and worked out plans like how to start with this event. There were several things to consider when planning a garden in a school setting. First we had to find a good location in our campus for the garden. We wanted a place that receives at least six hours of sun a day, especially for vegetables to grow. We also wanted a location that is not too close to areas where children play. So we selected the backyard of the School building.

What to Plant

There were many options for planting in our garden. Many wanted to plant a salad garden, growing things that will go into a salad--lettuces, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers and herbs. Well finally we decided few herbs like coriander and Lettuce, veggies likes ladies finger, cherry tomatoes and cucumbers that could easily grow in our backyard after enquiring with experienced people around.

Exploring the place

After meeting students we took them to the backyard and explored the area and decided where and how the raised soil beds have to be prepared and planed a rough marking to lay foot path in the garden.

Preparing the soil beds

On 19th of April 2014 Saturday, our team worked for about 4 hours in preparing the soil. As the soil was too tough we had to loosen it by all the necessary tools and few parents also contributed by sending black soil needed for the soil preparation. We made the beds and watered it and allowed to soak for the whole week.

Sowing seeds

On 26th of April 2014 Saturday, after adding compost to the soil beds seed sowing was inaugurated by our respected Principal and MR. Thoha Saleem and all the students and teachers also participated in this event and we successfully sowed the above mentioned seeds.

More photos here...

GIS conducted a workshop for grades 4 – 7 SLATE representatives on Poetry Writing and Poet-Laureates.  This was held from 18th February to 4th March 2014.The workshop was carried out for 2 weeks and teachers from school as well as invitee teachers joined to conduct the workshop for the students.  Students were given opportunity to write various types of poems such as free-verse poems and imagery poems and also talk about famous poet-laureates such as William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and William Wordsworth.