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There's a fresh new movement afoot: the school garden. This revolutionary approach to hands-on education teaches students to take responsibility for planting, watering, weeding and harvesting a small garden; in turn they are able to cook and eat the results of their work.

Experimenting with planting seeds in good and poor soil and observing the differences, and discovering what plants need to survive and thrive, give students a sense of responsibility and a sense of the importance of this ageless activity.

Gardening can be used to introduce math concepts — counting, comparing, estimating and graphing. How many seeds in a pumpkin, apple, or pear?

Within the compost process there is much math — weighing, volume, graphing and comparing — and science, such as learning about the temperature of microbes involved in the compost process.

In the schools where they exist, gardens have a place in every learning area: take virtual field trips at the computers; read books about gardening in the library; draw favorite plants in art classes. Even the youngest students get connected through story telling, as they visualize Peter Piper, Mary Mary Quite Contrary and The Princess and the Pea.

When the plants have flowered and produced, it's time to cook! Pumpkin bread, tomato-and-pepper salad, and fresh corn — all can be prepared from fresh-picked produce and shared with classmates.

School gardening projects begin in the spring, with the planting of seeds, and end in the fall, with the harvest and cooking of produce.