The Garden School has three unique ongoing projects that other schools in our area simply don’t have. The first is our zoo room, the second is our swimming program, and the third is our long field trips.

These projects grew out of a philosophy about “possibilities.”  When we started with animals, we bought a pedigree rabbit we called Abbey. We gave her the run of the school, and the children loved her. When Oreo came our way, he and Abbey would curl up together and it was really something to see. Oreo was a guinea pig. We also got a hamster that we named Hamlet, and Hamlet wore a collar and was taken for walks to the playground where he would enjoy eating anything green he could find.

These animals prompted us to build a zoo room when we finally built our own building. We centered the zoo room between our two classrooms. At this point in time, we have gone from a mainly rodent room with rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, degus and chinchillas, to an aviary housing finches, diamond doves, cockatiels, Quaker parrots, and love birds. They all live together in harmony and peace without cages. The children can visit and feed carrots to those animals daring enough to come up to them.

The zoo room is a work in progress. I clean it every weekday, and I spend a great deal of time on it over the weekend. I have to…they are animals and they make a mess. Their litter has to be changed nearly every day someplace in the room, and they always need to be fed. The walls need to be wiped down, new bedding needs to be replaced, sick animals treated, dead ones buried, and new appointments need to be carried in and things generally need to be moved, cleaned, changed, and managed at least twice a day every day because the zoo room needs to always be inviting and always cheerful.

It’s truly a labor of love. So when it’s icy and cold, or a tornado is pending…Judy is over making sure the animals have what they need because that’s my job. It’s MY project. It’s a project I’ve developed for the children so they have something special to enjoy on a daily basis and they can’t enjoy something dirty, smelly or just hanging on.

Swimming is also an oddity about the Garden School. Twice a week the children change out in matching suits and we take them to a beautiful pool in Newburgh where they actually learn to swim. It’s a project we developed years ago when we first set up shop in an apartment complex with a pool. Swimming is something many full time childcare children simply don’t learn to do until they are older. The longer a child waits to swim, the weaker his swimming will be all his life. Swimming is a coordinating activity, a test of independence, a bravery issue, and it’s something nearly any four year old should be able to do as a safety issue. So we do it.

We introduce swimming as play. Then we encourage children to see what the pool looks like from under the water. When they can do that, and enjoy it, we take them to the deeper end and have them jump to us. We catch them over and over until one time…oops…and they find themselves bobbing in the water under their own steam. At this point they learn to doggy paddle to the edge. When they are swimming twenty-five feet, they are ready to go off the board. When they have successfully gone off the board, they are swimmers – and nothing can stop them…

The last unique part of the Garden School Plan is the long field trip. We actually travel with our children all summer long. For ten weeks, we take our children to the surrounding cities, parks, lakes and points of interest within a three hour radius. There really is very little to do in our immediate area, so years ago, we thought it was possible to “travel.” Parents loved the idea, because it gave children of lesser means a real summer vacation. A vacation they can brag about when they go off to big school. “I went to the Louisville Zoo, the Nashville Science Museum, the Cincinnati Aquarium, the St. Louis Zoo, Mammoth Cave, and parks and lakes and even to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center.”

Traveling is difficult at times, just ask any teacher. Traveling means taking the responsibility to put very young children on a school bus and go many miles from home. It’s about toileting, and lines, and obedience and carrying enough lunch with you to satisfy fifty people, and that lunch needs to packed to stay fresh by 7:00 a.m. It means being watchful all day in a strange place. It means counting heads a hundred times.

When you weigh the pros and cons of traveling, many lesser places have decided it’s easier to just stay home, and if children don’t get to travel with their families, well that’s too bad. It’s hot, after all, and it’s long, and it’s filled with problems from the start to the finish, and it’s expensive. The real question is: “But what do the children get out of staying home versus traveling?”

Children who participate in our unique summer program go back to school with the idea that someone cared so much about them that “Our teachers were willing to reach as far as they could reach for me.”  This willingness strengthens the teaching bonds and allows learning during the school year to climb to new heights. Traveling allows children to see, hear, taste, touch and feel new things. They get to explore a bunch of new ideas and new experiences. They get to do more than play with the same old toys, in the same old four walls, in the same old place…

So…in future…what are the things I really want to do with them?…boat ride on the river…horse back ride…candy making plant…hatchery…and it will come…one step at a time, because we’re a unique place and the sky is the limit.