Autism…we get it, we live it, we love it! We love many things about our neurodiverse students. Among those things are their passion for a better world and their intelligence and creativity that can lead to solutions.

Every quarter at Temple Grandin School, we have two concurrent days we call Inquiry Days. During these two days, we explore a topic from all academic angles – science, math, social science, and language arts – giving our students the opportunity to immerse themselves in a subject, ask deeper questions about it, and search for answers, guided by our academic and support faculty.

As happens every year, Earth Day falls into the month when the world draws attention to and celebrates autism. This year, our Spring Inquiry Days have also fallen into this month, right on Earth Day. Ergo, our Inquiry Days have had an Earth Day focus. It is easy to focus on the problems our earth faces. Sometimes those challenges can feel overwhelming, and we can feel helpless in the face of them. Our students in particular, with their sensitivity, anxiety, and proclivity to perseverate on topics, can feel powerless and afraid when we talk about the earth’s problems. So, rather than emphasize the problems, we decided to access our students’ intelligence and desire to be part of a solution.

Introducing Temple Grandin School Spring Inquiry Days: we’re building a school garden! During Earth Day and beyond, our students are engaging in a variety of activities to make this dream a reality. Some of them are designing and building raised beds. Others are determining which plants to grow. We have a group that is writing a land acknowledgement for the land on which we will plant this garden. Yet another team is calling local businesses for donated supplies and going to those organizations to collect the supplies. We also have a group that is developing a zine to creatively express our reasons for planting a garden.

In the process, students are learning about physics, botany, history, and creative writing, among other things, and they’re practicing their social skills. Obviously, this is more than a two-day project. We will continue to create opportunities throughout the rest of this school year for building, planting, and tending the Temple Grandin Garden, so stay tuned!