Birchview School

The Birchview Elementary's greenhouse/garden has a two goals. The first goal would be to help introduce and educate students to where their food comes from and how it is grown. Many children today go to the grocery store and buy their foods with their parents or caregivers, but they never really learn where it is actually coming from.
The second goal for our greenhouse/garden is to help our children in our program gain and maintain healthier eating habits. The CDC says that there are more than one third of children who are considered overweight or obese. We would like to help make children in our program more aware of the food they are eating and how it effects them and their body. The Food and Fun program that we base our before and after school programming and Summer Day Camp off of has the main goal of providing children in the program with physical activity and to help them gain healthy eating habits. We feel a greenhouse/garden would help accomplish our goals.
The last goal we have for our garden is to help feed our kids. Our schools serve about 63 percent low-income families. We would like to use our greenhouse/garden to help feed our children healthy food and to help their families as well. We plan on having monthly gatherings that provide some of the food we have grown and some helpful recipe tips and taste testing to go along with them. We hope to provide enough food to send our children home with some throughout the harvesting seasons.