By Rita LeRoy
The Loma Vista Farm staff is very excited to support the change of the adjacent Loma Elementary School to the Loma Vista Environmental Science Academy, which debuts in the 2012/2013 school year.
The Farm’s 5-acre living laboratory site makes for a perfect context for learning with its many animals, pond, greenhouse, gardens, and kitchen.
Loma Vista Farm has a 38-year history of being part of the Loma Vista Elementary School campus. Carolyn Libby, who got the Farm started in 1974 and staffed the Farm for the first 7 years, was a teacher at Loma Vista. Rebecca Burke was another teacher at Loma Vista who dedicated her decades-long teaching career to integrating her classroom curriculum with Farm lessons. Rebecca wrote the original Farm instructional lessons as part of her Master’s degree in 1990. Throughout the history of the Farm, many Loma Vista teachers have extended their classroom learning to the Farm setting. This outdoor classroom is a powerful tool for motivating students to learn core subject matter in math, science, language arts, and social studies in a setting that encourages them to engage, ask questions, and want to learn more.
The Loma Vista Environmental Science Academy offers a direct and purposeful connection between classroom lessons and the outdoor natural environment. At the Farm, the students
have a place in their community to learn first-hand about the interconnectedness between the environment, agriculture, and themselves. The elements of a natural ecosystem come
together to provide students the opportunity to work in cooperation with nature.
Students are grounded in concepts such as growth and decay, predator-prey relations, pollination, life cycles, soil science, and water quality. Interwoven into all of these concepts is health. Students learn to re-personalize food and broaden their perspective on what foods sustain their health and the cultural practices that sustain the environment.
The community partnership potential is unlimited. Students will be excited to share their new knowledge with their parents and parents can share their skills with the students at the Farm. Current community partners extend the reach of their missions at the Farm, such as Kaiser in promoting nutrition education, Slow Food Solano in promoting food system awareness, and Solano County Water Agencies in promoting water quality and conservation education.
We welcome others to partner with us in helping youth learn skills that are transferable to leading healthier lives and becoming stronger, more committed members of their community.
