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Junior Garden Club
The Junior Gardener
program at the Navesink School began in 1997 under the
sponsorship of the Navesink Garden Club. The entire
student body is involved in various activities
throughout the year to put students in contact with the
natural world and to create a sense of ecological
awareness. A number of gardens have been established on
the school grounds, including those to attract birds and
butterflies, a daylily garden behind the backstop, a
tree farm for growing seedlings, and a bed of ornamental
grasses.
Fourth and fifth graders
are eligible to join the Junior Gardeners Club. The club
meets once a month. During this year’s monthly meetings
the students will be busy with a variety of projects,
such as working in the gardens; presses for drying
leaves and flowers; creating holiday greens arrangements
and centerpieces for the tables for the King James
PenPals luncheon; a visit from Scott Barnes, NJ Audubon
Society; creating decoupage flower pots, and creating
“Lunar Kaleidoscopes” of dried beans, etc. to enter in
the Youth portion of the NJ Garden Show. Even during
the summer months some of the members have worked in the
school gardens.
The various classes in the
school have arranged dried plant materials in tuna cans
for Thanksgiving, tapped maple trees for syrup, and had
a taste-test session of real and imitation maple syrup,
made Thanksgiving centerpieces and Valentine corsages
for Pen Pals, created a hummingbird garden at the rear
of the schoolyard. Each Fall, the fifth graders help
the Kindergarteners plant daffodil bulbs around the
school. In January, the 5th and K classrooms
are supplied with paper white narcissus, amaryllis and
multiplier onion bulbs and we have a discussion of what
makes “a bulb”. The classes grow the bulbs to flower,
and occasionally to seed. The 3rd graders
learn about hummingbirds in connection with their care
of the hummingbird garden. Various other projects are
undertaken at the suggestion of the teachers, or if the
occasion arises. The art classes, directed by Ellen
Fisher, draw posters for the Woodsy Owl and Smokey the
Bear contests of the National Garden Club, and over the
past few years we have had several students recognized
for their work.
The school grounds have
been certified as a Schoolyard Wildlife Habitat. In
1999, a PETALS grant was received to plant additional
beds behind the modular unit and by the parking lot.
Because the gardens have
increased in size and able-bodied members of the
Navesink Garden Club are becoming less available to tend
the gardens, Shonda Becker and the PTA have this year
assumed a lot of the responsibility for restoring order
to the gardens. Some of the gardens in the back of the
school will be changed over to lower maintenance
plantings, and this will enable the maintaining of a
neat and pleasing landscape, while leaving many of the
other beds for the students’ learning environment and
for the birds, the butterflies and the pure enjoyment of
the flowers which bloom there.
This program depends
heavily on the work of Navesink Garden Club members,
school parents, the Coast Guard volunteers who help
with the gardens when asked, and members of the
community, and on the principal, teachers and
custodians of the school. It takes extended effort
to build a successful program that will end
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