Kitchen gardens enable schools to promote environmental and sustainability learning. They provide opportunities to grow and produce healthy food and connect students with healthy food and lifestyles.

Sustainability action process learning resources

The sustainability action process is a five step process that supports problem solving through active student participation. These resources provide a structured and consistent approach to teaching sustainability across the curriculum and support learning outcomes in science, technology, PDHPE, geography, mathematics and English.

• Kitchen gardens 3-6
• Kitchen gardens 7-10

Assess your situation

Identify the capacity of your school to create and maintain a kitchen garden by:

• evaluating staff and community interest and support
• assessing the grounds for potential locations
• identifying grants and funding sources.

Go outside and walk around the school to investigate potential locations that have adequate sun, access to water and are accessible to classes. Record physical features on the school’s site map or a satellite image and label uses of areas. Identify the role of the grounds within the school, local community and local environment.

Activities for this investigation can include:

• mapping the physical features of the school and its immediate environment
• mapping how the school grounds are used by people, plants and animals

Take action

Contribute to a sustainable future by actively participating in kitchen gardens and food cultivation to produce foods that are grown locally and seasonally. This reduces the environmental impacts of transporting and storing foods.

Syllabus content

Using kitchen gardens for investigations into living things and food production enables students to work scientifically and use design and production skills in support of the Science and Technology K-6 Syllabus and the Technology Mandatory 7-8 Syllabus in:

• Early Stage 1 Living world – characteristics and basic needs of living things; using living things as food and fibre
• Stage 1 Living world – living things live in different places; plants and animals used for food and fibre
• Stage 2 Living world – survival of living things; producing food and fibre from living things
• Stage 3 Living world – growth and survival of living things; sustainably managing environments to source food and fibre
• Stage 4 Agriculture and food technologies.

Kitchen gardens are relevant to investigations into natural resource use and management in support of the Geography K-10 Syllabus in:

• Stage 1 Features of places – how places are organised
• Stage 2 The Earth’s environment – significance of environments; perception of environments
• Stage 3 Factors that shape places – humans shape places
• Stage 4 Place and liveability – enhancing liveability
• Stage 5 Sustainable biomes – biomes produce food.

Maintenance, harvest and use of kitchen garden produce can be used to support learning in PDHPE in the content strand of healthy, safe and active lifestyles, in particular, food choices, food groups and nutrition.

Interactions with kitchen gardens and their produce provide opportunities for students to read and compose procedural texts and work mathematically in collecting and representing data.