Evolving Morningside Elementary School Partnership: Gardening + Sensory Path
by Hazel Herman on behalf of the Fall 2022 Morningside Team
From August to October of 2022, our public health clinical group had the opportunity of working with the staff of Morningside Elementary and two professional gardeners. Our group is composed of 10 graduating seniors in the Texas Christian University nursing program: Alexis Sullivan, Mattie English, Elise Romero, Alexis Mertz, Danny DeGrande, Morgan Gray, Hazel Herman, Claire Lacomblé, Lizette Mejia, and Kate Fernandez.
See our TikTok page for a few videos from this semester.
Our goal for the semester was to assist with garden clean up and teach the Morningside students about gardening and healthy eating so they could take these skills home. Morningside Elementary has had an outdoor garden in its courtyard for over 20 years, but in the past few years, it hasn't been taken care of in the way it should. When we first showed up at the garden, it was very overgrown and quite messy.
Our initial approach was splitting our large ten-person group into two smaller groups of five. Each week one group would teach the kids, and the other group would focus on clean-up and garden infrastructure. Once the majority of the clean-up was handled, we discussed the idea of a sensory path with Mary Jo Greene, our lead Blue Zones garden partner. Danny DeGrande was instrumental in the sensory path development; he sketched a mock-up of the path, which was finished in just two weeks with our sweat equity and the help of Mary Jo and a team of Alcon volunteers.
We led the Morningside students in gardening lessons; while they loved playing in the dirt, digging, and planting, we were disappointed that we did not have time to incorporate the ideas of healthy eating into our weekly plans with the kids.
Although all of our goals were not reached, cleaning up the garden was the largest and most important task. Our hope is that cleaning up the garden reminded students and staff of the space they have at their school to do meaningful and intentional learning.
We are most excited about the sensory path, led by Danny. After speaking with pre-K, Kindergarten, and special education teachers, Danny and Mary Jo led our team to decide what would be best suited for this area. Danny really wanted to make sure that it was an area where these young developing minds could come and still feel like they were part of the garden, since they don’t fully understand how to garden yet. The sensory path is a great way for the children to get outside and see everything they will eventually be seeing in the garden.
While there is still a lot of work to be done, our semester is sadly wrapping up and we are unable to work on it much longer. This project will be entrusted to the Spring 2023 public health nursing clinical section, and we are excited to see how they continue collaborating with our partners to make this a fun and educational space for Morningside Elementary.