Our School Garden: Gardening With Blind Children

Gardening with Blind Children

Our School Garden at Kentucky School for the Blind

Gardening for Young Visually-Impaired or Multi-Impaired Children | NFB

Gardening for the child who is visually impaired or blind encourages the exploration of the environment using the senses of touch, smell, hearing, and taste. Gardening enhances these young gardeners' participation in their families and community and enriches their personal lives by helping them gain firsthand experiences through the use of their remaining senses and in the tending and nurturing of a living thing. They are able to establish a relationship with the plants and animals in their own garden or yard that, in turn, helps them to better understand their place in the world. (Click to read more)

Visually Impaired & Blind Children Learn to Garden | University of California, Agriculture & Natural Resources

Summer camp presented by Master Gardeners for blind children.

National Blind Gardeners' Club, Thrive, RNIB, for blind & partially sighted gardeners

Resources for blind gardeners in the United Kingdom.

Adaptive Gardening Techniques for the Visually Impaired | Oregon State University Extension Service

Adaptive techniques to make gardening accessible to the blind and visually impaired.

Gardening with Children who are Blind or Visually Impaired | MAER. org

Notes from a speech to Michigan AER by a parent volunteer on gardening with blind children. Good information here.

School Gardens and Resources

Ideas for Our School Garden

School Garden Wizard

A School Garden requires a child's intellectual, emotional and social engagement with things that must be measured, counted, weighed, arranged, planned and cared for. It can yield gratifying and often surprising results for you and your students.

Edible School Yard

What we are calling for is a revolution in public education - a Delicious Revolution. When the hearts and minds of our children are captured by a school lunch curriculum, enriched with experience in the garden, sustainability will become the lens through which they see the world.
- Alice Waters

Urban Sprouts

Urban Sprouts grew out of a doctoral thesis project conducted by Dr. Michelle M. Ratcliffe at Luther Burbank Middle School during the 2003-04 school year. At the end of the study, teachers asked us to stay on and help make the school garden a sustained program at the core of the school's curriculum. In our first year, 100 youth worked in the school garden, and we have since expanded to support school garden programs at six middle and high schools. Since 2003, over 3,700 youth have participated.

Instructional Activities for Our School Garden

School Garden Weekly

School Garden Weekly was created to allow students, teachers, parents, and volunteers the information necessary to start and maintain a successful school garden.

Our School Garden is Part of a Green Community

Our School Garden's Community Partners

Community Gardens | Operation Brightside

The Jefferson County Cooperative Extension Service manages the community garden program. They provide educational services and horticultural strategies that could improve your garden.

15Thousand Farmers

15Thousand Farmers helps create, empower, and inspire 15thousand new, sustainable, backyard/front yard farmers in Louisville, KY to feed their families and themselves! How? By using simple and easy instructions, checklists, materials and ongoing support provided through local growers and resources that will provide everything needed to start growing food in our yards, on decks or in community gardens.

Green List Louisville

We want to list all sustainable businesses, services and organizations in Louisville. We are freely connecting people with providers - for the benefit of us all, and especially that of our planet.

Slow Food Bluegrass

Slow Food Bluegrass is an all volunteer local chapter of Slow Food International. We seek to carry out Slow Food's mission of good, clean, and fair food for all, here in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky. Slow Food Bluegrass supports the activities and education of like-minded individuals, businesses, and organizations. Food is a part of our daily lives and is central to our culture and celebrations.We encourage the community to get involved with Slow Food by bringing good, clean, and fair foods to their tables.

Kentucky School Garden Network

KSGN Mission: To create vibrant, sustainable, edible gardens in every public, independent, and parochial school in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Every child and every school deserves a garden!