- Author: Shelby MacNab
Imagine a large grassy field on a sunny May morning transformed into the largest classroom in town for nutrition education. Open quiet space quickly became an experiential classroom as over 200 fourth- and fifth-grade students descended to learn about making healthy choices.
The University of California Cooperative Extension’s Youth Nutrition Education Program and the Network for a Healthy California’s Children’s PowerPlay! program partnered at an elementary school in Fresno to introduce students to edible plant parts,...
- Author: Rose Hayden-Smith
“The school garden has come to stay.”
In 1909, Ventura schoolteacher Zilda M. Rogers wrote to the Agricultural Experiment Station at the University of California, Berkeley, then the flagship agricultural campus for California’s land grant institution, and a primary proponent and provider of garden education resources for schoolteachers. Rogers wrote in some detail about how her school garden work had progressed, what the successes and failures were, how the children were responding to the opportunity to garden, how her relationship with the children had changed as a result of the garden work, and what she saw as potential for the future.
“With the love of the school garden has grown the desire...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
It's important to teach children from a very early age, starting at about 9 months, to eat a wide variety of foods, but this takes time and patience, says the nutrition, family and consumer sciences advisor for UC Cooperative Extension in Tulare County, Cathi Lamp.
Lamp says children learn to like new foods by exploring them, so parents shouldn’t be concerned if youngsters make a mess touching their food, playing with it and trying to put it in their mouths. These are all forms of learning.
“The child feels a natural sense of fear in trying new foods and for that reason it is important to permit them to become familiar with them from an early age,”...
- Author: Rose Hayden-Smith
Recently, UC’s Agricultural Sustainability Institute gave me the opportunity to visit Grant Union High School in Sacramento to learn about their GEO Environmental and Design Academy, which includes a gardening and cooking program.
The school is in an economically challenged area, and about half the students are English language learners.
Teacher Ann Marie Kennedy said something interesting about the students enrolled in the program: “They are disconnected from agriculture, but they are not disconnected from food.”
The Grant garden is essentially a shared school and community garden, which I believe is one of the best models...
- Author: Rose Hayden-Smith
The lunch lady at Cabrillo Middle School in Ventura, Calif., delivered the best commencement speech I’ve ever heard. In mid-June, Rita Pisani, whose passion is nourishing the bodies and spirits of people by preparing and serving them good food, spoke to more than 800 eighth-grade graduates and the well over 1,000 people who came to cheer them on.
Having a lunch lady be the featured speaker at an eighth-grade promotion might raise the eyebrows of some, but for this school and this school district, it makes sense. Cabrillo is part of the Ventura Unified School District, which operates farm-to-school salad bar programs at 17 campuses, and has gained national attention as an early adopter of farm-to-school and innovative nutrition...