Drink a rainbow

Posted on January 27, 2016 by kidsingardens

An effective phrase for teaching nutrition to children is “eat a rainbow!” The simple idea is that eating fruits and veggies of all different colors builds a healthy diet. We made this a theme on Food Day 2015, and I want to keep building upon it.

Sage Garden has provided us with their notebook of recipes which includes a different color smoothie for each grade. I pulled all of the different colors and am doing “Drink a rainbow!” workshops for my after school students.

I began by setting up the Sage Garden cooking cart with all of the equipment and ingredients laid out and the recipe written on the whiteboard.

Then I gave each pair of students a stack of laminated fruit and vegetable cards produced by the California Department of Education. The students sorted the fruits and veggies into two piles: orange/yellow and other. We talked about all the orange and yellow examples we found.

Students came up one by one for the various jobs: juicing the oranges, peeling the bananas, pressing the limes, adding the strawberries, measuring out the yogurt.

The next week we did purple smoothies, and this week we will blend up red ones. As you can imagine, it’s a very popular class!

Food Day Nibbles, part 2

Posted on November 18, 2014 by kidsingardens

To celebrate National Food Day at the end of October, our elementary and junior high schools presented 14 workshops about agriculture, nutrition and cooking to which students rotated all day. Here’s a taste of all of the hands-on learning that happened.

Resource Conservation District of San Diego joined us for the first time to teach kids to make pots out of newspaper and plant herb seeds for windowsill gardens.

Julian schools alumna Jill talked about growing up in Julian, going to UC Santa Cruz and starting her own farm, Mountain Chickadee Farm .

Chef Greg from Healthy Adventures Foundation taught another wonderful cooking class.

Camp Stevens headed up a workshop on making fresh smoothies. Very hands on with the kid-safe knives!

Mr. Martineau led a fun and educational workshop on the use of animal byproducts in everyday products, having students guess ingredients. Also included: how many bug parts in different foods—perfect for junior high!

UC Regent’s Farm Smart program once again joined us and presented another excellent hands-on workshop on corn.

Chef Jeremy from Jeremy’s on the Hill (and Jeremy’s on the Campus, our school lunch program) led a workshop at the junior high, talking about his restaurant and getting feedback from kids about school lunch

Mrs. Croman taught a special music class with food songs!

Kids pressed their own apple juice from local fruit, with help from the Julian Apple Growers Association.

The amazing Mrs. Cantor taught the kids to make sweet and savory crepes. Later in the day volunteers delivered extras to all of the volunteers and staff. Final count: 280 dinner plate sized crepes.

Local family and farm Cook Pigs joined us, talking about their sustainable operation and letting kids interact with their dog and piglet Chewbaca.

Juicing seminars, with the bicycle blender out for a spin!

All students returned to their classrooms to write about the day in their garden journals.

Not pictured: Mr. Pierce showed and discussed food films from the Nourish series, Mr. Duffy taught a food safety class as he and Mr. Lay made chicken-veggies kebabs on the garden’s BBQ, and Miss Carmen led a class on “eating real.”

We also extended Food Day into our after-school program with more cooking classes and a fieldtrip to a local restaurant. I played a memory game with kitchen utensils and followed with a taste test of guavas, papayas, dates, fresh figs, etc.

If you were involved in any way, thank you!!! Will you come again next year? 🙂

National Breakfast Week

Posted on March 7, 2014 by kidsingardens

On Tuesday we celebrated National Breakfast Week. Julian Pathways secured a grant for the school district from Action for Healthy Kids in order to promote the eating of breakfast, and we used it to provide a free breakfast to every child at the elementary and junior high. To make it a festive event, we all ate in the garden!

The chains were made from seed catalogues by the children

Centerpieces were paper roses, made from seed catalogues, by 3rd and 4th grade students last week in garden class.

Younger student colored these messages:

Breakfast is brain food!

Eat your breakfast!

Student musicians played on the gazebo “stage”….

…and under the plum tree!

Last week during garden class, I worked with the fifth graders to write “breakfast haiku.” Students read their poems in-between the musical presentations.