Next year I will be leading the effort to introduce a Harvest of the Month program at our school.  To get it started, we’re doing a pilot this month.

The backbone of this program is a set of excellent resources provided by a Network for a Healthy California (http://www.harvestofthemonth.cdph.ca.gov).  For each fruit or vegetable, they provide an educator guide, a parent newsletter, a community handout and a menu template on which you can print your school lunch calendar.

I attended the all-district staff meeting at the beginning of the month to introduce the program and pass out information to the teachers.  These multi-page guides have lots of information about the selected fruit or vegetable: nutrition, history, botany, recipes, science, literature links, etc.

During a University of Wednesday class, the children rotated to three stations related to peas. Here’s a craft template I created for an indoor station. (It was windy that day!)

Tip: Michaels has a single pack of cardstock greens in all different shades.

At another station, the students did a set of drawings of peas, which were planted in succession so that they could observe them at different stages of growth—also, to stretch out the harvest.

At my station we sampled sweet pea hummus, and we talked about all of the ingredients.  We also did a fennel taste test because I had some to use from our donated produce box.

I’m going to teach more pea-themed lessons this month so I’ve been checking out every children’s book I can find with the word”pea” in the title and creating a working annotated bibliography.  I’d love to find a grant to eventually purchase every title on the list.

We also made some decorations for the garden to announce the monthly harvest.  Here our 8th grade PLUS leadership kids are finishing up a banner started by the fourth grade.

This is a banner I had printed locally.

And finally, a taste test!  Snap peas were in our Be Wise Box this week, and I supplemented them with 2 lbs. from the Warner Springs Farmers Market I visited last night.  An ambassador took data (“”Do you like it?”), and once again, the peas have it!