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Provided by: Chicago Botanic Garden |Published on: May 19, 2025
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Synopsis
The webpage, produced by the Chicago Botanic Garden, discusses the urban agriculture program that is helping to support areas of Chicago.
The Windy City Harvest program helps to support Chicago in terms of supplying food, teaching residents about the health benefits of eating healthy, and offering local residents jobs through their training programs.
The Windy City Harvest program supplies fresh produce year-round at an indoor market in the Chicago land area. If local, this gives students an opportunity to see the benefits this program offers to the community.
The Urban Agriculture Toolkit, created by Windy City Harvest, gives teachers and students the resources to create or expand upon their own urban gardens.
A virtual garden tour, through an embedded video, allows students who are unable to visit the Windy City Harvest farms an up-close look at the program and the hard work that goes into the project.
Prerequisites
Local Chicago-land teachers may want to look into the field trip opportunities Windy City Harvest offers beforehand and see if their school qualifies for the free field trip experience.
Teachers may want to consider how to get the Urban Agriculture Toolkit into the hands of students and what methods will work best to meet the needs of their students in order for them to understand the important concepts contained in the Toolkit.
Differentiation & Implementation
The harvest calendar gives a breakdown of which produce is available in which months. Teachers can use this calendar to have students give the fractions, percentages, and decimal data for each type of produce based on the 12-month calendar.
Different field trip opportunities for grades 6-12 are available for local students. There are also farm tours available for students of all ages. Teachers may want to consider the three field trip opportunities (dependent on age) to immerse students in the sustainability projects that Windy City Harvest focuses on.
Using the Urban Agriculture Toolkit, teachers can create a scavenger hunt for students to find key information within the tool kit either on their own or within a group.
With scaffolding, students in the elementary grades can understand the importance of sustainable gardens in a city environment. Food Solutions: Climate Change Action for K-2 is a set of lessons that introduces students to how food and weather are related and what it means to eat local, sustainable food.
Students at the high school level can look into the job training and opportunities that Windy City Harvest gives to local students. If not local, students can research if any similar programs exist in their community.
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