Kids learn about nature and art at City Sprouts summer camp


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SALT LAKE CITY — Bringing together two non-profits, Wasatch Community Gardens and Bad Dog Arts, City Sprouts Summer Camp teaches kids to appreciate nature by exploring the garden and eating and making art tools from its goods.

In the morning, kids ages 8 to 10 start off by learning about the process of growing plants. Throughout the week, they will plant seeds, tend to plants, harvest and eat the produce grown at the Grateful Tomato Garden.

Monday was the first day of camp. The children released live lady bugs into the soil while teachers explained the relationship between helpful bugs and plants.

Though Wasatch Community Gardens has always offered after-school activities to low-income students in programs like the Boys and Girls Club, this is the first year they have offered a summer camp to students of all incomes.

"We were doing a really great job offering low-income children programs, but we got some feedback that we weren't offering them to people who could pay," said Julie Rabb, youth program director at Wasatch Community Gardens.

Keeping with their mission, they also offer scholarships to those individuals who may want to participate in the summer camps without a way to pay, either in full or partially.

For the second half of the day, teachers and kids ride TRAX to Bad Dog Arts Studio where they learn to use natural goods from the garden to make art tools, and then create art.

The partnership, explains Rabb, was natural."We serve the same kids in our after school programs. We do very different things, but we empower kids of all incomes, in our case to fresh produce and in theirs, to art."

At Bad Dog, children in the summer camp will make things like wire and plastic butterflies and the classic rock pet.

Evander Cavazos, a teacher at Bad Dog, is heading the art class. He started there as a student when he was 10 years old and has since volunteered and been taken on as a teacher. He feels his life has been affected by his art studies in all aspects.

Art from the camp will be featured in the Gallery Stroll at Artspace Commons on Friday, July 15.

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Celeste Tholen Rosenlof

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