Kitchen Classrooms

North Carolina Cooperative Extension of Warren County

 North Carolina Cooperative Extension partners with communities to deliver education and technology that enrich the lives, land and economy of North Carolinians.

Our FoodCorps Service Member, Horticulture Agent, 4-H Agent, and Extended Food and Nutrition Education Progammer (EFNEP), all work to provide nutrition education to children through school gardens. Our team has used gardens for programming at South Warren Elementary School, Mariam Boyd Elementary School, and Warren County High School. 

Mariam Boyd Elementary School Garden

 Students benefit from our school garden in the classroom and after school. First and fourth grade students use the garden through every stage to grow plants and use the produce for classroom cooking. Our fifth graders also tend the garden every other week with Culinary Club. This after school club exposes students to where food comes from, how to grow their own food, and how to prepare complex dishes.

Hillis School Gardners

Hillis Elementary School started their garden in the spring of 2011. Thanks to Beth Sloan, principal at Hillis, The garden is incorporated into the everyday life of the school. Each Wednesday, every student participates in Eco Hour. This hour has a wide array of topics that cover nutrition, horticulture, and environmental stewardship. Des Moines FoodCorps helps with lesson plans for the 5th grade and Stephanie Peterson, garden coordinator, supports the rest of Hillis. Some lessons have included school wide crock pot day, sweet potato day, and interactive nutrition lessons.

West High School Garden (Waterloo FoodCorps)

A high school garden and garden club were established in 2012. There is in-class education as well. Produce from this garden is given to the culinary programs and donated to the Food Bank. 

Lowell Elementary (Waterloo FoodCorps)

 People's Garden Grant installed a garden here in spring 2012. In conjunction with this garden, there are classes on gardening and cooking with garden produce.

Madison Farm to Fork Farm to School Program

This is a service site with the national program FoodCorps.

The Farm to School program serves students in the Ennis School District. Students engage in regular classes in the newly built Ennis School Garden, receive nutrition education lessons, take field trips to local farms and ranches, participate in Good Thymes Camp (a summer day camp with a focus on sustainable agriculture & natural resource conservation), and much more! The Farm to School program is also working with the Ennis School Lunch program to source and serve more fresh, local foods in the lunchroom. 

 

St. Joseph Community School Garden

This fall was our second year of our garden program. Our garden reaches K-8 every student in multiple ways. 5th and 6th grade students help with the planting and harvesting, and all students use produce in cooking lessons, eat produce in school lunches and classroom snacks, and use the garden in class curriculum. Family volunteers help with summer maintenance. We also donate excess produce to our local food pantry. We had a large plot at our local hospital gardens and four new raised beds. This spring, we hope to add additional raised beds and are looking into a hoop house.

 

Con Sabor

The program presents Cuban recipes, using local products. It shows traditional and current Cuban cuisine, with information about the healthy cook. We present many materials related with botanical and cultural characteristics of many edible plants, in order to show the rich biodiversity of them. There are some messages about the relation between food production and environment. It has a deep educational purpose.

I have published 6 cookbooks and several healthy food papers, such as:

Convivia La Habana-Germinal

Slow Food Cuba joins projects linked to the production and consumption of food related to human health and environment preservation. These groups are linked to several Cuban institutions that lead the processes of sustainable feeding. They linked different fields such as education, health, production, storage and consumption of food, agroecology, permaculture, renewable energy and food culture. We have worked in an integrated way. We also have collaborated with the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Turin and other university projects.

Warren County High School Garden

Our school garden program is centered around our students learning sustainable agriculture, raising young people’s interest in farming and growing real food, and also learning to prepare this real food in healthy ways. To this end, we are integrating gardens into class curriculum, starting a small School Supported Agriculture with a group of 20 interested 9th graders, as well as continuing our afterschool Garden Club. We use season extension techniques, organic planting methods, and use food waste from a local restaurant to contribute to our composting system.

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