Gardens for Humanity offers an art enrichment program we call “Celebrating the Art in Earth” to six schools in Sedona and the Verde Valley. This program provides much needed art and environmental education, which supports academic standards in a way that is engaging to students.
This program is central to our mission and serves as a model for how we develop other educational programs tied to school gardens by
• Providing activities that connect children to the environment;
• Developing awareness of where food comes from;
• Giving children the tools to make healthier choices for themselves and the environment.
• Using Art and hands-on learning experiences to develop emotional intelligence and practical application of learning.
Art, as the means of environmental and garden education, helps students develop greater self-expression, creativity, experimentation, problem solving, in addition to enhancing their emotional relationship, appreciation and sense of responsibility towards the natural world.
Five artists present an interactive art program introducing art skills, techniques and concepts. It benefits 3rd graders in 7 different classrooms totaling over 150 hours of art instruction impacting approximately 175 students. Our team of professional artist/educators utilizes mixed media, poetry, ceramics, singing, drama, collage, music and painting which they relate to language arts, botany, and earth science. The project coincides with Gardens for Humanity school gardening programs.
The Life Cycle of a Seed – Movement & Dance
The Color Wheel and the Colors We Eat
“Environmental education is that component of education that may include one or more of the following:
Arizona Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) – Promoting Environmental Literacy in Arizona
Why Art and Environmental Education (pdf) – Research supporting the benefits of Art and Environmental Education
Find and choose a program you like, and help to expand and flourish it.
Gardens for Humanity acknowledges that we work and gather upon the ancestral homeland of the Yavapai-Apache Nation. We honor, with gratitude, the land itself and the Yavapai and Apache people who have lived here for millennia and who remain a vital part of this community today.