Learning in the Garden Earth... At Clear Spring School this year, we adopted a theme for the year around which to build special projects, that of "Garden Earth". We have always been an ecologically minded school and were early to adopt recycling in all our classrooms. We have won the Keep Arkansas Beautiful first place award several times for our Trash-a-thon fund-raiser in which out students pick up waste and litter in Eureka Springs and Carroll County. So this year, our students have been planing gardens and building trails in addition to their regular studies. In an earlier blog post I brought up the connection between Friedrich Froebel, his development of the kindergarten, and the development of Educational Sloyd. Gardening is one of the very best ways to connect children with reality. A friend of mine in California, Bob Barnett, sent me a link to a School Gardening project his son James Barnett is doing in a school in Santa Maria, CA. It is the kind of project that children in all schools should be doing. It is a clear application of the Wisdom of the Hands. The photo above is of James in his school garden.