Class isn't in session but middle school students in Kuna are busy tending to a project they're deeply rooted to with a Giving Garden that goes beyond the reach of their school grounds.
The future vision for the garden at Kuna Middle School is growing. Not only do dozens of Mosaic Team students, who share the same set of core teachers, learn how to apply everything they learn in the classroom but they take home a lifelong lesson. It's one that sprouts beyond filling their diet with nutrition and flips the switch for youngsters who frequently have technology at their finger tips.
"They're more about video games than school stuff and getting outside, getting active," says Abram Williams, 13, who helped build the additional raised flower beds for the garden, among other things. "So, this was one way to get kids in team Mosaic to get out and be active."
Just like gardening, it's not one action that produces a yield but the combination of acts throughout the entire process that work successfully in tandem. Armed with knowledge from their botany experiments, scale design drawings in math class and research in language arts, the students dug in to nature.
"I helped plant, I helped with the sprinkler system, I helped with putting the dirt in the raised beds," says Rhys Miller, one of the Kuna Middle School students working on the project. "I helped with a lot of the stuff out in here."
All of the students' hard work will pay off with crops going to cooks at the cafeteria and the Kuna food bank.
The second year for the garden beautifies the school grounds, while it inspires the youngest generation to be active in their community.
"I enjoyed how it taught everybody teamwork. That's key in life, in my opinion," Miller says.
Both students heading into the eighth grade next Fall say they plan on coming back to help out at the garden even after they move on to high school. About 200 students at the middle school are part of the Mosaic Team.
In the future, the hope is to include fruit at the garden and to invite elementary students to learn from the middle school students. Future Farmers of America organization, or FFA, members from the Kuna High School led presentations earlier in the school year of which teachers say Mosaic Team students were all ears.
