Food/Service at Oak Hill Elementary

This school year, the FoodCorps slogan is “Food/Service” and can be seen emblazoned on the back of the purple shirt I so frequently wear in the classroom. Oak Hill’s third grade classes have been the embodiment of this message through their year-long Service Learning project. Having used the inaugural year of the garden last year to teach science and nutrition lessons to 70 third graders, teachers felt that the garden would be the perfect way for kids to learn about the meaning of community service.

In the fall Oak Hill sent a vegetable survey to the High Point Food Pantry to assess the need for fresh vegetables. The majority of produce available at the food pantry was canned or preserved in some way, because until last year they did not have the capacity to collect and store fresh produce. Thanks to Guilford County’s Share the Harvest initiative, food pantries across the county can now collect and distribute fresh fruits and vegetables donated from grocery stores, backyard gardens, and now even schools.

The survey, which listed a dozen cool-season vegetables, was given to nearly 200 individuals and families who visit the High Point food pantry. We were able to sort our results, and found that the top 3 vegetables on the list were broccoli, cabbage, and mustard greens. Mmm mmm you gotta love those brassicas! Third grade students were able to plant the most popular choices in their outdoor garden to overwinter for a spring donation. Not only will students deliver fresh vegetables, ready to eat, but they will also be donating seed starts so that folks can learn how to plant their own vegetables. Thanks to grant money received last year from the Whole Kids Foundation, Oak Hill now has a Grow Lab, a cart on wheels with fluorescent lights nourishing the tiny seedlings. The students will care for the seedlings for about six weeks until they are taken, along with the harvest from the garden, to the High Point Food Pantry.

Seedlings under Grow Lab with recycled utensils to mark each one!

Veggie Tasting at Oak View Elementary and More!!!

As kindergarten classes at Oak View Elementary began filing into the cafeteria at 10:30am last Monday morning, they were greeted by a peculiar sight clear across the room: three big people and several little people in hair nets, aprons, and gloves, in a flurry of activity around a table filled with fresh carrots, avocados, lemons, and… some strange leafy-green vegetable. An illustrated poster of “KALE” hung behind the table, and right before those kindergarteners’ eyes, Dixie cups filled with that same bright green veggie began to appear on a rolling cart and make its way around their lunchroom. What was going on? Why, thank you for asking! A school-wide tasting of raw kale salad, that’s what! Oak View Elementary was the January site of FoodCorps’ most recent “Harvest of the Month” tasting event in Guilford County.

I should introduce myself: I’m Eliza Hudson, the other FoodCorps service member serving in 9 of the title-I High Point elementary schools this year alongside Leah Klaproth. This year, Leah and I have been coordinating monthly local food tasting events just like this one at Oak View, which we’ve deemed “Harvest of the Month” because they always highlight an in-season, locally grown fruit or vegetable. Beginning in October with apple cider and cinnamon applesauce donated by Greensboro’s Whole Foods at Parkview Elementary, the tastings we’ve done have evolved a bit each month. On January 28^th, in our most recent event at Oak View, we were fortunate enough to have nearly 35 pounds of fresh Vates Blue-Curled kale donated by Mike Faucette of Faucette Farms in Browns Summit, to make enough raw kale salad for the entire Oak View Elementary student body: just under 500 students.

In December, we also featured a Faucette Farm crop for our “Harvest of the Month” at Northwood Elementary: cabbage, in apple-cabbage coleslaw we made for Northwood Elementary, and as Leah mentioned in a previous post, November’s “Harvest of the Month” was raw sweet potato sticks with tzatziki sauce at Oak Hill Elementary, with the sweet potatoes we used donated by Troxler Farms.

Oak View’s event last week was particularly inspiring for me. I’m at the school three days a week, not only teaching in 3^rd grade, but also with their ACES program on Friday afternoons. The Oak View 3^rdgrade teachers I’ve been working with this year, Lori Lee, Shari Sawyer, Peggy Stuart, and Melissa Wirth, are using the Oak View school garden and my skill set as a FoodCorps service member to conduct their required grade-level service-learning project this year.

 The morning of the “Harvest of the Month” event, they sent me a schedule with names of students from each of their classes (a total of 12) who would be helping Leah and I. Doing everything from making the raw kale salad and passing out samples, to making sure their peers voted for how they liked it on the sticker board by the lunchroom exit, these twelve 3^rdgraders were engaged in the most inspiring, hands-on service-learning experience I’ve witnessed yet in this position. They were an integral part of delivering a delicious raw kale salad to over 450 students ages 4-12. How inspiring is that?