Last garden tour of 2015

Posted on December 31, 2015 by kidsingardens

Before we head into the new year, here’s a glimpse of the fun we had and the work we did in the school garden in November and December—aka my periodic “Garden Tour.”

Leaf rubbings in garden class made sweet placemats for “Take your parent to lunch” in the garden.

Following up on the “How is it grown?” video the students watched on Food Day, we made a simple cranberry relish with orange juice and local honey.

While the cranberries cooked, we worked on updating our garden journals—-decorating the covers with images from garden catalogues and inserting recipes and other lesson materials from the last couple months.

Miss Sally Snipes gave us a bushel of daffodils to add to the garden. To make this a fun activity, I called the class “Bulbs and Bubbles.” After planting a few bulbs, students got to blow bubbles…then back to the bulbs….and then bubbles…

I took the portable speaker out to the garden to play Christmas music as students went wild decorating the garden. Where could they hang ornaments? Anywhere they could reach.

For out last garden class in December, the younger grades made tangerine pomanders—a highly sensory, fine motor activity.

Older students do an activity that is now a bit of tradition around the holidays: wreath making with freshly cut cedar and rosemary sprigs.

Freezing weather sent us inside for a few garden classes. Here students measured out their own healthy trail mix and munched on it while we played garden bingo.

Anticipating a lot of cold, wet weather to come, I am now thinking through new inside garden projects and activities for the rest of the winter.

More to come in the new year: our visit from Americorps and garden fashion! Thanks for following along in 2015! And thanks for sharing my love and enthusiasm for “all the good things that happen in school gardens.” Happy New Year!

“Soda is the monster we need to mash!”

Posted on November 10, 2015 by kidsingardens

As part of our Food Day program, Sun Dog Art Studios led an anti-soda art project at the junior high. Each student made a “monster” out of a soda can in thirty minutes using construction paper, puffy paint, scissors, straws and pipe cleaners. Teal and Tomy, the founders and art teachers of Sun Dog, were a delight to work with, and I highly recommend them to any school or organization in San Diego County.

Sun Dog made these samples with information on soda consumption which they left with us to incorporate into our displays.

Librarian Colleen allowed us to hang half of the collection behind the checkout counter at the Julian Library the next day. The collection will stay up through the end of November.

I hung the other half at the Wolf Den, the junior high multipurpose room.

Stay tuned for more wonderful reports from Food Day 2015…..

The Great Julian Apple Crunch

Video

Today Julian Elementary and Junior High celebrated National Food Day with 15 workshops on nutrition, cooking, backyard gardening and agriculture. It was amazing—look for upcoming posts with photos and stories.

For now, let me share a video with you. Every year people across the country celebrate good, fresh food with an Apple Crunch event. We did one this year, thanks to Ken and Linda Limon who visited a neighboring orchard whose owners allowed them to harvest for free, picked 400 apples, hand sorted them, packed them in flats of 50 and delivered them to cold storage in the school kitchen. We washed and bagged them by class size. Students wore their red No Excuses shirts to school, Garden Ambassadors held up big leaves, and our principal got on the roof to film the event. The weather was sketchy today but it held just long enough…..five minutes later, downpour! Simply amazing.

Thank you Linda and Ken—you made this happen!

A little idea: “freshly picked”

Posted on September 23, 2015 by kidsingardens

I started a new tradition this year. When I visit my K-2 classrooms, I bring something “freshly picked.” This week it was rosemary.

Now that my garden ambassadors are chosen, they make the bouquets for me at recess and return the vases to the garden room for me to pick up on the way to class.

The idea is that the vase stays in the class until the arrangement withers, and then the ambassadors collect them after a week. It’s a small touch that “brings the outside in,” fills the room with a nice fragrance and gives students a chance to make observations and learn plant names. Beauty is a language of care!

It works, it works, it works!

Posted on September 11, 2015 by kidsingardens

Nutrition/cooking education. Make no mistake: it works.

It’s said all the time but I’m here with hard evidence to prove it: When you grow and cook food with kids at school, in a fun, interactive way, they are more likely to try new foods and want to cook at home.

As mentioned in the last post, we made ratatouille in our garden/kitchen class. I also sent home a letter with the recipe to each family and encouraged the kids to teach their parents the recipe. I said, “If you do make ratatouille at home, please send me a picture.” The very next day I started receiving these:

Once I received the picture, I visited the student’s class with congratulations, a few questions about his/her cooking experience at home, and an invitation to have lunch in the garden that day with a friend. I’m thrilled that at our school “lunch in the garden” is a motivating reward, as it is sometimes hard to think of incentives that aren’t sweets/snacks or little throwaway objects.

None of this is lost on you, dear readers, but allow me to list the levels of goodness here:

-Students have a positive experience with a certain food at school and bring that excitement home.

-Students show off newly acquired skills to parents, and we all know that re-teaching is good learning.

-Families learn new recipes—in this case, one that is vegetarian, seasonal, adaptable and affordable.

-Students are congratulated and rewarded in front of their peers for extending their learning after school.

Many thanks to Wynola Flats for sourcing these delicious vegetables and ordering what I needed. I can’t tell you how exciting it was to stop in yesterday for more ingredients and have Stacy say, “People have been coming in, buying ingredients for ratatouille….”

Back to school, back to the garden

Posted on August 28, 2015 by kidsingardens

It’s still August, and we’ve been in school for 2.5 weeks. (I know, I know.) Nonetheless, it has been wonderful to be back out in the garden with the lovable children of Julian Elementary.

During our first afterschool garden class with the little ones, we read stories about grapes and then gobbled some up. (It was my first time reading Lousy, Rotten, Stinkin’ Grapes by Margie Palatini, and I recommend this retelling of an Aesop’s Fable—great vocabulary and beautiful illustrations.) Though we had a lovely crop of grapes at the beginning of the school year, the kids have been loving them too as they walk by the fence line and so we supplemented with a donation of organic grapes from Miss Anne! (A note on the whiteboard in the staff room turned up an offer of backyard produce in no time.)

The older children in my second garden class painted letters for our Early Start Kindergarten alphabet garden and spruced up the compost bucket. This was a good, quiet activity in the shade on a very hot day. And helpful too—every year these letters have to be repainted.

“S” for sage….sweltering…in the sun….

In garden class during the school day, I worked with first grade students on understanding the recipe for compost using the visual aid I made below. The laminated pictures stick to the black bin (foam board) with velcro:

Then we headed out to the garden to practice sorting and adding ingredients at the bin and peeking in the bottom of the unit to see what became of last year’s school lunch.

I heart generating excitement and mystery in the garden. During our introduction to the lesson in the classroom, I told the kids to always be on the lookout for something new in the garden and wondered aloud if anyone would notice the brand new “Mr. Tree.” Invariably someone would spot it on our way to the compost bins.

(Sidenote: Marisa gave me the pieces for this “tree face,” Chris hung it, and I love it so much. It is my new goal to put a face on every juniper behind the fence line and create our own army of ents.)

While I had half of the class at the bins, the classroom teacher had the other half under the plum tree reading Compost Stew by Mary McKenna Siddals.

With the two kindergarten classes, we talked about grapevines and our first garden rule for the year: Be Safe. We decided we would practice “being safe” by walking in the garden instead of running.

While the classroom teacher read The Fox and the Grapes by Mark White, I toured the children around four major features in the garden, and we learned these vocabulary words: Kandu Gate, rainwater, grapevine and gazebo. At each location I gave a child a photo of the feature to hold (printed from a picture and laminated—I plan to make a set of these for everything in the garden for games and vocabulary review.)

Then when we returned to the classroom for wrap-up, we sang:

“Have you ever seen a garden, a garden, a garden? Have you every seen a garden? A garden like mine? With a gate, and rainwater, and grapevines and a gazebo? Have you ever seen a garden, a garden like mine? “

This is a song I will sing all year long with the younger grades, inserting new, seasonal vocabulary.

It’s going to be a great year! (Signing off with a picture of the invaluable cart I wheel around with everything I need in the classroom and out in the garden.) BTW, as of today, I am about 200 clicks short of 30,000 views on this blog. Thanks ever so much for following our story as it unfolds in our little school garden…..

Last bits of awesomeness (ESY Part 5)

Posted on August 7, 2015 by kidsingardens

And finally, here I will dump all of the great ideas that I want to share (and not forget) that didn’t fit in the preceding posts about the Edible Schoolyard.

After our garden sessions, we were asked to write down questions that still lingered in our minds. During break, the presenters had a chance to review the questions and then address them if they weren’t already going to be covered. Good technique.

At the end of each day, we filled out three cards: head, heart, feet. On each we wrote, what we learned? (head) what we felt? (heart) and what we’ll do next? (feet) They were strung up in the dining commons each day for everyone to see.

Right by the exit in the kitchen classroom was this set of folders stocked with recipes that the class just cooked. Students are encouraged to pick one up on their way out, if they’d like.

Once a week, students and their parents are invited to “Family Nights Out” where families cook the same recipes students learned in class. Students become teachers as they recreate the menu, and everyone goes home with more skills. So incredibly cool.

I’m always looking for good, simple rules to guide cooking/garden. I may just rip these off for the coming year.

Students know where to find these take-out boxes so they can leave with any unfinished food.

LIttle vocabulary thrown in—the word geek in me loves this.

The room is full of interesting decorations: botanical prints, kites, hats from various world cultures, clocks that tell the time in different world cities, a piano, quotes….

ESY loves hand-drawn visual aids. This is on the wall to help students learn their greens.

The Charlie Cart was on display—expensive but amazing. Wheel this thing in to a classroom and you have a mobile kitchen with a sink, running water, stovetop, microwave and cabinets filled with every pot, pan or utensil you might need to run a demo.

All in all, the ESY was a wonderfully rich experience. A million thanks to the Sage Garden Project who made it possible for me to attend!

Humanities in the garden and kitchen (ESY Part 4)

Posted on July 31, 2015 by kidsingardens

Something garden educators believe: all subjects can be taught in the garden. Something I believe: this is true, but some subjects are easier to teach in the garden than others. Science and math come easily, and language arts is not hard to incorporate either. I think the most challenging curricular integration is social science. It takes a lot of planning to align lessons, plant the historical crops and create the wrap-around materials to deliver the material. Edible Schoolyard excels at this. Here is one of their staff laying out how all of their garden and kitchen lessons match up with 6th, 7th and 8th grade social science.

Then they walked us through one of their lessons. As you can see below, there are numerous concepts involved in teaching the history of rice in China. (This is hand-drawn and colored—again, back to beauty!)

Then they laid out all of the vegetables we’d be cooking with (beauty, again)….

And we got cooking in our teams….

..to create the most beautiful and delicious platter of fried rice, with veggies from the garden.

Here’s another lesson they teach:

We rotated through various stations to learn this content, one of which was a snack-making station, which involved amaranth from the garden.

It goes on….here we ate a meal in the dining commons that represents the Columbian Exchange. Like I said, amazing.

Activities in the garden also teach history. Here is a lesson on various techniques ancient cultures used to move things. After this mini-lesson, students were challenged…

…to move various heavy items using this pile of stuff. History, engineering, experiential learning…oh my.

Other activities work as scavenger hunts in the garden:

Can an average school garden replicate this? It would be very challenging without significant resources, but nonetheless I remain inspired to think through connections between the garden and the social sciences in the coming year. It’s always helpful and inspiring to look at the “best of the best”—thank you Edible Schoolyard for pioneering this work!

“Everything in its place” (ESY Part 3)

Posted on July 27, 2015 by kidsingardens

This principle is at work everywhere at the Edible Schoolyard, and I’m certain it contributes to a well-organized, efficient, safe environment in the garden and the kitchen.

First the garden—color-labeled tools on a mobile cart.

I need to create something like this!

Reusable signs for the various crops they grow:

And the kitchen:

ESY staff repeatedly say that the kitchen is a “stone age” kitchen. There are very few electric appliances and lots of hand-powered presses, grinders, etc.

Cubbies for backpacks and jackets in the kitchen keep everything tidy near the workspaces.

Each table had a “toolbox” of all of the kitchen items students need to cook. Favorite new tool? The wavy knife!

I left inspired to think through the “systems” in our own garden and brainstorm how to better organize them!

“Beauty is a language of care” (ESY Part 2)

Posted on July 18, 2015 by kidsingardens

My 6-day experience at the Edible Schoolyard Academy (ESY) is simply too big of a story to tell into one post so I’m breaking it all into my “take-aways.” The first is a principle of Alice Water’s that touches every part of the ESY program: we show students we love them by creating beautiful spaces for them to eat, learn, and live in. (Perhaps this applies to many/all areas of life?) Let me show you how this plays out…

We were welcomed by this booth at the opening reception…

…and fed things like this…

Freshly gathered and arranged flowers from the garden show up everywhere.

Notice the handmade “papel picado” strung across the classrooms (also in the kitchen classroom.)

I could go on posting my flower photos, but you get the idea.

This commitment to beauty is also seen on the handwritten, illustrated recipes used in the cooking class. (We even had a session with Chef Ester on how to whimsically illustrate a recipe.)

…and also in the signage for just about everything:

Even the placemats, which connected our meals to the 6-8th grade humanities lessons they teach—lessons also taught at their school.

At the end of each cooking lesson, students clear the workspace, set the table with a tablecloth, and then go to the side table (below) to pick out elements for a centerpiece.

Check out the sign! Enough said.This emphasis was encouraging to me because in the Julian Elementary Garden, one of our 8 components of our mission statement is: We grow beauty. As such, we have had lessons during which we transplanted donated irises to the front of the school with Miss Sally to beautify the parking lot, learned about flower shows and then picked daffodils for our local show in Julian Town Hall, and made wreaths and flower arrangements to place around campus. All of this takes time away from “edibles,” but I am reminded it’s incredibly important and we are right on track!