A Soil Summer

This summer, we have created a new and exciting program, A Soil Summer. Our program includes many lessons about soil erosion, soil composition, soil layers, and how soil is the foundation for all living things. Our goal is to provide these lessons, at no cost, to summer schools, summer camps, and other youth programs throughout Monmouth and Middlesex County. Each lesson ranges from forty-five minutes to an hour, and we prefer to teach our lessons to groups of about 25 kids. Of course, we can teach multiple groups in one day, if needed for a larger group of children. All of our lessons are interesting and interactive, tailored to best serve pre-kindergarten through sixth grade students. Please view our brochure to learn more about A Soil Summer and our activities, and email hreynolds@nullfreeholdscd.org if you are interested. We look forward to hearing from you!

A Soil Summer Brochure

As part of our Soil Summer, we visited the Garden Club at the New Brunswick Library and used the Enviroscape, an educational tool that shows a town’s landscape, to teach the children about erosion. The children learned about the real effects of littering and the improper use of pesticides and insecticide. We used small clippings of paper to represent litter, green sprinkles to represent fertilizer, red sprinkles to represent insecticide, brown sprinkles to represent animal waste, and cocoa powder to represent soil. They then saw how rainwater carries litter, pesticides, insecticides, animal waste, and soil to our watersheds, and learned how this erosion can poorly affect those organisms that live in bodies of water.

We then ended our lesson by making our famous, “Soil Supreme,” a sweet treat that represents the layers of soil. Crushed vanilla wafers are used for parent material, chocolate pudding is used for subsoil, and crushed chocolate cookies are used for topsoil. The concoction is topped with green sprinkles, representing grass, and a gummy worm!