Both physically and mentally handicapped children benefit from opportunities to manipulate the natural environment and especially to nurture. Arlington has seen a tremendous influx of immigrant families, and teachers at schools such as Glencarlyn Elementary have found schoolyard projects to be a way to engage non-English speaking students. We didn't anticipate that schoolyard projects would become a stimulus for community building. Sutton explains that each grade level has responsibility for a particular garden or other part of the courtyard. A pond and garden club meets on early release days to clean and maintain the student-built pond.
Kindergartners raise crickets to feed the frogs.
The Vietnamese custodian brings aquatic plants and expertise. With schoolyard gardens, Glencarlyn has found a way to attract otherwise reticent immigrant parents. Indeed, gardening is a wonderful platform for multicultural education, as the crops, herbs and flowers display both our cultural differences and our universal agrarian heritage. Perhaps the schoolyard movement bespeaks a deep desire to restore for our children something we know is missing in their lives. As their world becomes more and more dominated by asphalt and electrons and constrained by adult fears, the schoolyard may emerge as the community's shrine to the importance of nature in their lives, an oasis in the urbanized environment where both children and adults can develop stewardship skills, nurture each other and touch ancestral home.