 May 19-23, 2025
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School Garden Week is an exciting NEW celebration to highlight the incredible school gardens in our state. It's an opportunity to celebrate the learning, discovery, food production, and community-building that takes place in school gardens. And, it's a chance to recognize the hard work of students, teachers, and community members who care for these gardens.
2025 School Garden Week Daily Themes
Monday: Show You Care-ot! Celebrate school gardens as places to foster environmental awareness by doing trash cleanups, garden bed prep, or lessons on soil, water, and wildlife.
Tuesday: The Garden Keeps Me Grounded Celebrate gardens as spaces to support student mental health and balanced lifestyles by doing guided meditations, mindfulness activities, yoga, or other forms of exercise inspired by the garden.
Wednesday: Bring Learning to Life Celebrate gardens as tools to teach core subjects like reading, writing, science, and math by facilitating a garden inspired lesson plan or educational activity.
Thursday: Dig In! Build excitement around food grown in the garden by doing vegetable taste tests, eating foods grown in Minnesota, or sharing recipes that feature garden produce.
Friday: Tap Into Your Roots Celebrate gardens as places of cultural connection by sharing family recipes, teaching global and indigenous languages using the garden, and connecting with your community through gardening practices.
All Week Long: Sow Together, Grow Together Have a planting party with the 2025 School Garden Week featured vegetable, carrots, or any seeds or transplants ready for the garden!
Suggested activities are designed to highlight the many benefits of school gardens and can be mixed and matched to best accommodate your school, students, garden space, or weather limitations.
Register your garden’s celebration! The first 200 gardens registered will receive a free packet of Little Finger carrot seeds to help you celebrate. If you would like to receive the seeds by MN School Garden Week (May 19-23), please register by May 7.
Whether you’re a student, teacher, parent, or community member - we hope you'll join in on the fun!
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When: June 17-18, 2025
Where: South Central College, Mankato
Bring agriculture into your science classroom
Bring agricultural concepts to life in your classroom! Join us for a free, hands-on professional development experience designed for science teachers in south-central Minnesota. This immersive event is your chance to explore standards-aligned agricultural materials that empower students to understand grade-appropriate science topics, discover career opportunities, and apply their skills to real-world agriculture concepts.
What to expect
Presented with support from Midwest Dairy and curriculum resources from the Food and Agriculture Center for Science Education, this immersive professional development event is designed to equip teachers with the resources they need to bring agriculture into their science classrooms. You will learn directly from the developers of the materials, visit a local dairy farm, meet industry professionals, work through hands-on activities, and more.
This workshop is free for participating middle and high school teachers; all meals and hotel accommodations are included.
Registration for the 2025 National Agriculture in the Classroom Conference is open! We are extremely excited to host this conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota June 23-26, 2025. This conference is the premier professional development opportunity focused on teaching through a lens of food and agriculture.
The conference theme of "Lakes, Land and Legends" will bring together teachers from across the country to learn from agriculture-focused tours, skilled presenters, engaging keynote speakers, and from one another. More information can be found at https://agclassroom.org/conference/
Farm Camp Minnesota
Farm Camps allow students to get an up-close look at farming, food production, and the technology that makes it all possible. Best of all? It’s interactive, engaging, and designed to make learning fun!
Now is the perfect time to schedule your summer or fall Farm Camp experience! Reach out to our Farm Camp Director to get started on our Connect Me webpage.
Forget the guinea pig. How about adopting a 1,500-pound dairy cow for your classroom mascot?
The Discover Dairy “Adopt a Cow” program is an exciting, year-long experience for your classroom. Throughout the program, you’ll get an inside look at dairy farming and be paired with a calf from a working dairy farm in the United States. You’ll find out what her name is, when her birthday is, where she lives, and how the farmer takes care of her. You’ll also receive progress updates, photos of the cow, live chats from the farm, activity sheets for your students, suggested lessons that follow Common CORE standards, and even opportunities to write letters to your calf! All updates are easily accessible via an online portal and app for Apple and Android.
Enroll in the free program between May 1 and September 15, 2025 and join the moo-vement that has impacted 1.7+ million students across the globe!
May Trivia Question: Solanum lycopersicum is the scientific name for the most popular homegrown vegetable or fruit. What is it?
Send your answer to sue.knott@state.mn.us. The first two people to respond with the correct answer will win a MAITC travel mug.
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