student | What's not to like?

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!

During garden lessons, I try to stay open to unscripted moments. If an unusual insect shows up, if pods have just erupted in seeds, if a child sees something beautiful that has escaped my notice, I want to be ready to stop everything for the teachable moment. It happens a lot in the garden.

At the beginning of the year, I hung a tree face on one of the junipers and led the students by it on the way out of the garden, waiting for squeals and pointed fingers. After seeing Mr. Tree, they speculated that Mrs. Tree might be the next one to show up. Show up she did.

When we discovered her a couple weeks later, one of the girls told me she needed a “neckwus.” I agreed and sure enough, during our next class, we noticed that Mrs. Tree was all blinged out.