Eco-Education Grows at Journey School

Students gather around a raised flower bed and begin working quickly. Some with soil drenched hands, others with water cans and seed packets.

“We haven’t seen proof yet, but there are signs,” students said as they worked in their school garden. “A gopher ate the seeds. We’ll plant more.”

Faculty at Journey School in Aliso Viejo say they have been inspired by the changing world and hope to instill the importance of sustainability to all of their students—beginning in kindergarten.

The school’s environmental education and ecoliteracy program focuses on specific lessons, tailored to each grade level. The ecoliteracy curriculum spiral begins in elementary classes and grows into more complex learning in the middle school grades.

“They develop this beautiful relationship with nature and they don’t even know it is happening. It swells up inside them over time,” said Shaheer Faltas, school director. “It is embedded in their ethics and experiences. It is part of what they do.”

The lessons, which are designed appropriately for the students' age, are presented in the following way:

• Kindergarten: First grade: Foster environmental awareness by experiencing a sense of wonder and awe
• Second grade: 10-week life cycles in the garden (bee, butterfly, worm and seed)
• Third grade: Farming principles, integrates with cooking and building focus
• Fourth grade: Native gardening and study of ancestral skills and tool building
• Fifth grade: Watershed literacy and rainwater harvesting
• Sixth grade: Composting and recycling
• Seventh grade: Sustainability and permaculture principles
• Eighth grade: Eco-leadership

Most of the ecoliteracy lessons are integrated into the regular school lessons. For example, in the fourth grade when students would usually be learning California history, they don’t just learn it, “they live it,” Faltas said by making foods from the native acorns and bows and arrows from the yucca plant.

Michelle Spieker, one of the founders of the Journey School Ecoliteracy program, said she has heard concern from people within the community about the gardens, trees and landscaping efforts the school has put into the property they only rent from the school district. While they hope to remain on the property for a long time, Spieker said, “this campus is part of how we pay it forward. We teach the students to make the place better not just for yourselves at this moment, but for the future.”