Land

Background and Benefits:

The school grounds and plants are a powerful tool for teaching students about the connection between the health of their communities, the environment, and themselves. Through hands-on experiences, students develop awareness of the physical environment and a sense of connectedness with their land, and all that grows on it.

Current Practices and Engagement:

    • Eagle Eco Center (EEC): This garden and environmental center designed for the Early Childhood classes at AIS-R boasts a garden, pond, chickens, turtles, fish, a lizard and other animals

    • Middle School Garden (MSG): This garden was designed and created, in part, by Middle School students with the idea that food grown can be used for consumption by students and staff in our MS/HS Dining Hall

    • Planting of Ice Plants (Indigenous succulent plant): During Earth Week, all students K-12 planted an ice plant to be used on our campus

    • Planting trees for Earth Week: This connected to the theme “Trees for the Earth” whereby each division participated in a tree planting on campus

    • Drip irrigation: This is used in school gardens to reduce evaporation and increase water efficiency and absorption rates

Student Involvement:

Curricular connections and implementation of environmental practices into our EAGLE Honor Code. The second "E" in EAGLE is for Environmental and asks that each of us take the following actions:

    • I am responsible

    • I reduce, reuse and recycle

    • I advocate for sustainable practices

    • I am a model of healthy living

    • I care for our community and planet

School Gardens:

A school garden can bring the natural and social sciences to life through hands-on experiential learning opportunities. Students become excited about science, math and nutrition through gardening experiences and gain an understanding of where their food actually comes from. Additionally, creativity skills and physical fitness are developed through the planning and labor involved in gardening.

Middle School Garden:

The Middle School National Junior Honor Society (MS NJHS) worked with the AIS-R facilities staff to plan and construct three garden beds for school use. The goal of the project is to provide an opportunity for students to experience the production cycles of agriculture. Food that is produced in the garden will either be donated to our local community or included as part of the Dining Hall menu.

Eagle Eco Center (EEC):

An interactive natural learning environment was created in the Elementary School in order to help students gain awareness of living things, understand the responsibility of caring for living things, and engage with native species from Saudi Arabia.

Goal:

To continue to create more environmentally sustainable campus grounds, incorporating native and drought resistant plants while utilizing composted materials created from our own waste. Additionally, we will begin to use some of the vegetables grown in our AIS-R garden in our Dining Halls.