Welcome to literally the first sunny day we've had for gardening at Burbank this spring. It has been so dreary lately. I think these photos taken by the students in Ms. DeSnoo's 3rd period class capture our day quite well.
The workers:
Here are our totals, for teaspoons of sugar in one 20 oz bottle of different beverages:Water – 0 tspSugar Limit for one entire day: 48 g or 12 tsp
V8 – 6 tsp
Vitamin Water – 8 tsp
Sports drink – 9 tsp
Apple juice – 18 tsp
Coke – 17 tsp
SoBe Citrus drink – 25 tsp
It was so great to have the schools represented at this big, high profile show. And our district Educational Gardens Director, Arden Bucklin-Sporer, gave a presentation that was an inspirational pep talk for all of us school gardeners. Great job everyone!
Be very excited! Today the new Meatrix II premiered! This sequel to the original Meatrix takes you into the "matrix" of factory farms to show what's really going on. The animated stars, a pig, cow and chicken, ask you to join the resistance and help them save family farms and healthy meat & dairy.
The weekend of March 4-5 I presented at the Western Region Association of Experiential Education Conference at Camp Arroyo in Livermore, CA. (pic of Camp Arroyo's children's garden) "Experiential Ed" seems to be generally marketed to the outdoor, adventure type crowd. I have to admit I was wary of the different expectations of programs for suburban California kids climbing mountains compared to our urban reality where just mud itself is a bit scary. I wasn't sure I'd fit in with this group of educators.
Tuesday was our practice Salad Day at Burbank M.S. For this round we did minimal school publicity, just a handful of posters made by Mr. Perez’s students and hung up around school by Ms. Keenan’s students. Perez’s and DeSnoo’s 2nd period groups, and Keenan’s 4th period class harvested all the lettuce heads and as much loose salad mix as they could, washed it, dried it in the salad spinner, checked through all the leaves and removed any yucky stuff, and presented beautiful, fresh, organic, garden-grown salad during lunch period. We set up a table in the cafeteria, with tablecloths and crepe paper decorations, and a handful of students sat at the table helping to serve the salad and eating it. Lori and I passed out salads to students sitting at tables throughout the cafeteria, and our table was swarmed with students and teachers coming to eat their salad. Many came back for seconds and thirds! Teachers even took home a few plastic baggies of the leftovers. Lunch groups, like Ms. Valdez’s girls group, took enough for their members. The students and teachers ate ALL the salad we had harvested. We had two huge silver bowls of salad—I’d estimate 6-8 lbs at least.
Dr. Ignacio (School Assistant Principal) came by during lunch and said to me, “Never, not once in my entire career as an educator has this happened before, but this year three times students have seen me eating my apple and have asked for some fruit to eat.” For the first time ever for many students, that apple for the teacher has a new meaning.IT'S shocking that because of the rise in Type 2 diabetes experts say that the children we're raising now will probably die younger than their parents — the result of a disease that is largely preventable by diet and exercise. But in public schools these days, children all too often are neither learning to eat well nor to exercise . . .school garden
[At the Edible Schoolyard] we're not forcing [children] to eat their vegetables; we're teaching them about the botany and history of those vegetables. We're not scaring them with the health consequences of their eating habits; we're engaging them in interactive education that brings them into a new relationship with food. Nothing less will change their behavior . . .
. . . when a healthy lunch is a part of a class that all children have to take, for credit — and when they can follow food from the garden to the kitchen to the table, doing much of the work themselves — something amazing happens. The students want to taste everything. They get lured in by foods that are beautiful, that taste and smell good, that appeal to their senses. When children grow and prepare good, healthy food themselves, they want to eat it, and, what's more, they like this way of learning.
We need a revolution, a delicious revolution, that will induce children — in a pleasurable way — to think critically about what they eat.
—Alice Waters
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