Seeds of Change: Kīhei Charter School students grow a garden to ‘Help the World’
Jaelyn Harris, an 8-year-old second grade student at the Kīhei Charter School, is enthusiastically involved in the school’s new garden project.
“I have a green thumb,” she says. “I have been planting at home since I was two. My grandmother taught me. At my house we are doing a little project now, planting Snap Dragons and Pansies.”
Harris has big dreams for the gardening project and what excites her. “What I am most excited for is that people will get to help people. And I can’t wait to see the look on their faces when people see that we are helping.”
At the direction of her second-grade teacher, Mikenna Dehnert, Harris and other members of her class have prepared a bare patch of land at the charter school and are planting kale, tomatoes, parsley, basil, snap dragons and pansies.
According to Dehnert, “the kids get to do hands-on learning, study plant life cycles and photosynthesis, research soil types, experience working in a group, and develop responsibility skills as they learn how to care for and water their plants.”
Harris has a child’s wisdom and even bigger dreams. “I like helping the environment and it’s really nice to see it thriving because when I see it thriving it makes me think I am helping the world. And helping keep people alive because of trees and plants, if we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t be able to breathe.”
Harris are working with classmates to develop a school gardening project at the Kīhei
Charter School. “What I am most excited for is that people will get to help people. And I
can’t wait to see the look on their faces when people see that we are helping,” said
Harris.
Short-term plans for the garden produce include use in healthy school lunches and maybe also helping the community, a goal that Dehnert realizes is a big dream but one that may just come true.
What does “Planting Seeds for the Future” mean? According to Dehnert, “That means literally planting seeds but also we’re investing now taking small steps, investing seeds now, we don’t always see the fruit of it immediately, it’s a process and it takes time, that’s what’s so beautiful about gardening, it takes time, it takes effort every week, watering the plants, taking care of it but then we going to have this beautiful garden. This big picture dream we can hold on to that says there’s so much hope for the future.”
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