In September 2025, I planted myself in the Bregy Elementary hallway at the Trust for Public Land table during their Back-to-School Night. Their schoolyard project had been completed in 2023, so tabling at these events was a great way to meet members of the school community and stay connected with administrators and staff. As students and guardians walked by our table, collecting swag and sharing thoughts about their schoolyard, I took note of the other organizations tabling around us.

At that point, I had been in my Fellowship for about two months, and with each schoolyard I visited and each partner I met, my mind was swimming with ideas for how to energize and engage community members with their schoolyard in ways that embed stewardship into their format. 

That mindset, paired with being surrounded by partners at Bregy, led me to walk a few feet over to the table next to ours called Curricula for the Community. As I talked to Gianni Johnson, the person leading the nonprofit, I learned that Curricula for the Community focuses on building an appreciation for literacy both at school and at home. Almost immediately, I saw a direct connection: fostering a love of literacy by using the schoolyard as a learning tool. I pitched the idea of pairing a nature-related book with nature journaling in the schoolyard, in which students would read outside, observe the natural environment around them, and even use their schoolyard as a space to create. 

Through that initial conversation, the seeds of this event were planted.   

From there, the metaphorical “watering” took the form of follow-up meetings with Gianni, discussing logistics, determining a date, choosing the book, looping in the Bregy principal and other members of the TPL team, and finalizing the nature journal worksheet design, goals, and structure of the event. Additionally, a few 8th-grade student leaders were designated as co-facilitators and helped clean up the schoolyard a few weeks beforehand. 

Eight months after that first conversation, I was watching students get to know their rain garden by taking notes and drawing what they could see, hear, and feel. The K-3rd grade students drew flowers they saw in the rain garden, the 4th-6th graders wrote about what they could hear, and the 7th-8th graders took their observations further by creating poems and drawings about how being in nature made them feel. They even held a competition at the end, listening to poems their peers had written and cheering on the two favorites. 

The purpose of this event was to get students out into their schoolyard and to engage with it in a meaningful way–to use it as a place to learn, to draw inspiration from, to connect with, and ultimately to care for. Nine grades, around 200 students, and countless drawings and creations later, that purpose had been achieved.