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Kids off the Couch
Two resourceful moms have built a website dedicated to getting your kids off the couch. It is called appropriately, KidsOffTheCouch.com. Each week they feature a memorable movie for the family to watch together and couple it with an off-couch activity.
Some of their garden related activities include:
1) The Secret Garden + Edible Gardens
2) My Fair Lady + A Flower Market Visit
3) FernGully: The Last Rainforest + Botanical Gardens
Lastly, as a bonus, the illustrations by Laura Cornell are brilliant.
City Green is Greening the City
City Green is a non-profit community garden organization currently working in Paterson, New Jersey. Their “City Sprouts” program addresses the need for in school and after-school enrichment in the Paterson Public Schools, educating children on the environment, nutrition, and how to grow fresh healthy food. This following is an overview of City Green’s programs for the current school year.
The School 9 Cougars Go Green club, along with clubs in Schools 12 and 16 are in their second year of Environmental Club programming. School 7 begins its third year with science teacher Marla Arrington directing. All the clubs are supported throughout the year by City Green’s staff and materials.
This year the school programming reaches ten schools, and all ten club directors have received the newly developed City Green Environmental Club Manual, called “Make a Difference”, which contains guidelines and instructions for a full year of programming. The teams have begun recruiting club members and making plans for the year.
Using the manual instructions, each club will begin or expand a recycling program at their school. They will raise awareness with a recycling contest and school-wide recycling projects. Thanks to their awareness campaigns and elbow grease, many tons of paper will be diverted from the waste stream.
Several schools are making plans to work with City Green to begin a Garden Club using the green space around their school, and on adjoining lots. Gardens will be planned in the fall and installed in the spring. City Green provides consultations, resources and curriculum support to help make their school garden an effective hands-on learning tool.
With energetic and talented teachers of the Paterson school district and enthusiastic youngsters, the City Green programs provide the tools to empower Paterson’s young men and women to take action and Make a Difference! And in the words of a School 9 Cougars Go Green gal, “[They] plan to save the planet!”
For more information about City Green please contact executive director, Jennifer Papa, info@citygreen.org, or visit their website at www.citygreenonline.org
American Heart Associations recommends reduced intake of added sugars
A new American Heart Association scientific statement provides specific guidance on limiting the consumption of added sugars and provides information about the relationship between excess sugar intake and metabolic abnormalities, adverse health conditions and shortfalls in essential nutrients. The statement, published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, for the first time, provides the association’s recommendations on specific levels and limits on the consumption of added sugars.
Added sugars are sugars and syrups added to foods during processing or preparation and sugars and syrups added at the table. High intake of added sugars, as opposed to naturally occurring sugars, is implicated in the rise in obesity. It’s also associated with increased risks for high blood pressure, high triglyceride levels, other risk factors for heart disease and stroke, and inflammation (a marker for heart disease), according to the statement’s lead author Rachel K. Johnson, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.D., associate provost and professor of nutrition at the University of Vermont in Burlington.
“Sugar has no nutritional value other than to provide calories,” Johnson said. “Consuming foods and beverages with excessive amounts of added sugars displaces more nutritious foods and beverages for many people.”
The statement says that most women should consume no more than 100 calories (about 25 grams) of added sugars per day. Most men should consume no more than 150 calories (about 37.5 grams) each day. That’s about six teaspoons of added sugar a day for women and nine for men.
In contrast, the statement cites a report from the 2001–04 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) that showed the average intake of added sugars for all Americans was 22.2 teaspoons per day (355 calories).
Soft drinks and other sugar-sweetened beverages are the number one source of added sugars in Americans’ diet, according to the statement. “One 12-ounce can of regular soda contains about 130 calories and eight teaspoons of sugar,” Johnson said.
The American Heart Association recommends a dietary pattern that is rich in fruit, vegetables, low-fat dairy products, high-fiber whole grains, lean meat, poultry and fish.
“This new statement expands on earlier recommendations and gives consumers more detailed guidance by recommending a specific upper limit on added-sugars intake,” Johnson said.
In addition, the statement recommends that no more than half of a person’s daily discretionary calorie allowance should come from added sugars.
Discretionary calories refer to the number of calories “left over” after a person eats the recommended types and amounts of foods to meet nutrient requirements, such as fruit, vegetables, low-fat dairy products, high-fiber whole grains, lean meat, poultry and fish. Added sugars, alcoholic beverages and solid fats — including saturated fat and trans fat — are typically considered discretionary calories that are to be included after individual daily nutrient requirements are met.
“It is important to remember that people’s discretionary calorie ‘budgets’ can vary, depending on their activity level and energy needs,” Johnson said. “So, if you can’t live with the recommended limits on your added sugars, you’ll have to move more.”
For example, a moderately active 51–55 year-old woman who eats 1,800 calories per day and maintains her weight would have about 195 discretionary calories per day and only about 100 calories, or half that amount, should come from added sugars. In comparison, if that same woman, still maintaining her weight, was more physically active and burned 2,200 calories a day, she could consume 2,200 calories a day, and would have a larger discretionary ‘budget’ of about 290 calories. About half of that amount, or 145 calories, could come from added sugars.
To ensure proper nutrient intake in the diet and to limit excess calories, Johnson said people should be sure foods high in added sugars are not taking the place of foods with essential nutrients or increasing their total calorie intake.
She recommended that people use their added sugars “allotment” as a vehicle to enhance the flavor of otherwise nutrient-rich foods. For example, choosing a nutrient-rich dairy product, such as a flavored yogurt or a sugar-sweetened whole-grain breakfast cereal, would be a better choice than a nutrient-void candy.
School Gardens in the News
1) Los Angeles, CA
A new crop of School Gardens
Even as state funding wilts, support for school gardens is growing…
It may seem counterintuitive to start new programs in this economic climate. Summer school was canceled at many campuses this year, the $1.7-million California Instructional School Garden Program grant to the Los Angeles Unified School District has expired, and the budget crisis has left countless teachers unemployed.
But this groundswell, largely sparked by parent and community interest — and perhaps some inspiration from Michelle Obama’s White House garden — is finding support in all the right places.
2) Oregon City, OR
Planting Seeds of Change
Anna Meyrick, the director of Oregon City’s Hera Community School, is always on the lookout for new ways to educate and engage students at the alternative school, which seeks to encourage students to make positive changes through community involvement, education and art-based projects.
3) Brooklyn, NY
Let it Grow
This summer, my daughters and I are getting our hands dirty, thanks to their schools and our city. We may live in an asphalt-dominated landscape, but with minimal effort we have found green spaces where we can practice the good, old-fashioned art of gardening.
4) Brooklyn, NY
New planter stolen from schoolyard garden in Park Slope
Parents at Park Slope’s Public School 107 were shocked last week after a planter, recently purchased for their vegetable garden was stolen from the schoolyard.
“It’s a school, for God’s sake,” said parent and garden coordinator Michele Israel at the Eighth Ave. school.
School Gardens in the News
1)Spring Hill, FL
Kids learn hydroponic gardening
Linda Rothenberg’s students have turned more than $5,000 in grants into an outdoor classroom that is growing vegetables. As Westside Elementary School’s science lab teacher, Rothenberg sees more than 700 students in kindergarten through fifth grade, and all have participated in the project.
2) New York, NY
PS 6 breaks ground on NYC public schools’ first green roof, a dream of teacher who passed in ‘07
A public school in New York City has broken ground for a rooftop garden and greenhouse. The roof will have planting soil for vegetables and flowers, solar panels, a weather station, a turtle pond and a greenhouse for classes during the winter.
3) St Thomas, USVI
At Sibilly, Composting Starts From The Ground Up
Jason Budsan of EAST talked to the Sibilly School Gardening Club members after the ceremony. “Compost is nature’s first recycling project. It starts from the ground up,” he said. He showed them three flower pots filled with different kinds of things that will become compost — papers, grass and leave clippings and kitchen trimmings. He explained how the compost bin works. “Collect organic waste materials, and put them in the tumbler. Add enough water to moisten only. Close the door and give the bin five turns every few days. In about four to six weeks, you will have supercharged soil.
4) San Jose, CA
Parents help San Jose school garden programs grow
The Booksin school foundation and parent volunteers are working on a grass roots pilot program to turn the campus garden at 1590 Dry Creek Road into a training center for teachers from other schools in the San Jose Unified School District. Teachers would use the Booksin garden to learn how to conduct classroom activities, and then bring that knowledge back to their students, says parent Jennifer Mowery.
5) Pocantico Hills, NY
School of gardening: Stone Barns is teaching teachers how to grow vegetables and integrate that into the classroom curriculum.
Long before the popularity of buzzwords like “sustainability,” “locally grown” and “organic,” Denise Martabano was planting her first school garden with youngsters from the Meadow Pond Elementary School in South Salem…And now this local pioneer in the school-gardening movement is spending many of her Saturdays at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills leading workshops with teachers from throughout the tri-state region, teaching them how to grow gardens at their own schools and integrate them into the classroom curriculum.
6) Portsmouth, England, UK
Sounds like this school garden is extra special
The garden is alive with the sound of music thanks to new oversized instruments at a school…The seven beautifully hand-crafted outdoor musical instruments which range from eye chimes, to drums, xylophones and chime bars, have been carefully selected for younger children.
School Garden News – California
School Garden Teach Kids
By Kathryn Nichols
Garden manager Tanja Roos walks through the greenhouse at Carmel Middle School and plucks a ripe cherry tomato from a bushy plant near the back door. She hands it to a visitor, a vivid taste of summer in a little red globe.
Growing and harvesting vegetables – it’s so simple that even a child can do it. Yet this elementary activity is a springboard to learning about science, the environment, nutrition, and the sweet sensation of working together for a common goal.
New school gardens are blooming in California’s Monterey County with almost every year. Teachers and administrators are finding that the garden can be woven into just about every aspect of the curriculum, even history, cultural studies, foreign languages, and English.
At Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Academy in Salinas, students often do creative writing and poetry projects in the garden. At All Saints Day School in Carmel Valley, kids hold an autumn feast each year to celebrate native American traditions of the harvest, using squash, corn and beans they’ve grown themselves. Not only that, but everyone loves being in the garden.
“After lunch, the kids had the choice of going to recess or working in the garden,” said Kim Derenzo, who up until recently was the garden manager/nutrition coordinator for Martin Luther King Academy. “It wasn’t unusual to have 40 to 60 students come out to work in the garden on any given day. And they really worked.”
“There’s nothing better than having kids out in the garden,” said Roos. “As much as we can get them involved, we do.”
School gardens aren’t a new concept – in fact, as early as 1909, Montessori was espousing gardening as a way to increase youngsters’ appreciation for nature, and to develop desirable traits like patience and responsibility.
But school gardens took on a new significance in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in the Bay Area, when famed Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters urged schools to grow their own produce and use it in cooking projects.
“Berkeley was the Mecca of school gardens,” said Roos, who grew up there and went on to managing Carmel Middle School’s remarkable garden, the Hilton Bialek Biological Sciences Habitat.
School gardens became even more desirable as a practical way to teach science skills, a green laboratory that needed only soil, seeds, sun and water.
As time went on, the schools also had the pressing need to teach children about nutrition, and there’s no better way to get kids to eat their vegetables – they are far more likely to try produce they’ve grown themselves.
Derenzo said she would often sample items with her students straight out of the garden – even raw beets and radishes. “They’d eat it up,” she said.
State and local grants became available for gardens, and groups like the California School Garden Network and the National Farm to School Network are now lending support in the forms of guides, curricula and information.
Enthusiastic parents, community members and staff have also been instrumental. Family members, teachers and college students worked side by side to develop Martin Luther King Academy’s garden a few years ago; “You’d see grandparents, parents, babies out there on work days,” recalls Derenzo.
At Carmel Middle School, turning 10 acres of open space into a garden was the dream of science teacher Craig Hohenberger and then-principal Carl Pallastrini, inspired by the garden and kitchen classroom established by Alice Waters in Berkeley.
Hohenberger started by taking his science classes outside in 2000, and planted an organic garden. Now it’s known as the Hilton Bialek Biological Sciences Habitat, named for a former Carmel School Board trustee who was an instrumental supporter of the garden. The Habitat currently includes a pond and small waterfall, a bee garden planted with native varieties to attract insects, a solar-powered greenhouse, a native plant nursery and an outdoor kitchen, as well as a stunningly beautiful one-acre vegetable garden; plans call for the building of a Green Education Center there in the near future.Every student at Carmel Middle School is involved in the Habitat in one way or another. If they’re not banding birds or helping with watershed restoration, they’re planting seeds in the greenhouse, making pizza in the wood-fired oven, or tossing vegetation on the compost heaps.
In 2006, the Habitat received the Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Award, California’s top environmental honor, for its exceptional programs.
Not just public or elementary schools are going back to the garden. Preschool programs are offered at the garden run by Salinas Adult School, for instance. Community groups like the Boys and Girls Clubs and YMCA spend time at the Bialek Habitat. At All Saints, a private school in Carmel Valley, the garden area has expanded from five to 18 planter boxes and added a chicken coop last year, according to teacher Mandy Winston.
Winston directly teaches science to 24 fifth-graders and also rotates other classes, kindergarten through fourth, through the garden for a variety of programs.
“What always amazes them is being able to harvest something that grew from a seed they planted,” said Winston. “It’s like a light going on: ‘Hey, this is where it comes from!’ And they finally understand what part of the plant they’re eating.”
Fifth-graders at All Saints spend much of the school year learning about plant science concepts like photosynthesis and pollination; third-grade students have an agriculture unit that involves growing lettuce and having a salad party in honor of Monterey County’s most famous crop.
And research is discovering that garden-based learning does, indeed, pay off.
A 2005 study in Temple, Texas, found that third, fourth and fifth-grade students who participated in school gardening activities scored significantly higher on science achievement tests compared to kids who didn’t garden. There’s also evidence that children who get to try fresh vegetables develop better eating habits, and that through taking care of a garden, they learn a lifelong sense of stewardship and responsibility for the land.
“The passion our staff has for the garden is felt by the students,” said Roos. “Passion is addictive – it’s a magnet. It shows them this is an important thing to be doing. And the bigger picture is that this is about the health of our planet.”
School Garden News – Oregon
Growing lunch
by Leslie Cole, The Oregonian
Schools embrace healthier kids with locally-grown foods
Mention school lunches, and it’s hard to find someone who’s not hungry for change.
Maybe you can’t see, smell or taste it just yet, but the shape of public school meals is shifting, in the Portland area and beyond.
Food costs are climbing, money is tight and results that resonate with families across the state will take time. But right now, the future of the school cafeteria looks promising.
Some recent developments:
• Two years after a splashy pilot program of scratch cooking and gardening began at Abernethy Elementary in Southeast Portland, Oregon has new positions in two state agencies dedicated to what’s known as “farm-to-school.”
Cory Schreiber in the Department of Agriculture and Joan Ottinger in the Department of Education are charged with connecting farmers with school cafeterias, encouraging students to eat more local fruits and vegetables, seeding a statewide school garden program and getting lessons about food into classrooms.
• Local purchasing has taken a big leap forward. More than 32percent of Oregon schools buy some of their food for school lunches from farmers and processors in their communities, according to an Oregon Department of Agriculture survey. Recently relaxed rules in the 2008 federal farm act encourage more local purchasing. School districts that buy more than a certain dollar amount must get bids on food purchases. For many years, it was impossible to cite a preference for local products (meaning Washington, Oregon and Northern California) when soliciting bids. Last year, that restriction was removed.
Despite other hurdles — and there are many — school food service directors are buying fresh fruits and vegetables from nearby farmers when they can, with little or no additional federal or state money in their pockets.
A yearlong grant from the Kaiser Permanente Community Foundation has given enough oomph to two public school districts — Portland and Gervais — to put not just locally grown produce on lunch trays, but also monthly hot entrees in Portland schools using Oregon products.
Doug BeghtelThe food that students grow end up in the cafeteria and could someday, school officials say, defray as much as 20 percent of the cafeteria’s produce costs.
“We want to use it to demonstrate what could be possible statewide,” says Deborah Kane, vice president of the food and farms program at Ecotrust, which supports farm-to-school activities around the West.
What’s missing is permanent funding. Oregon is one of only a handful of states that does not provide money for public school meals. School districts need more resources, say a coalition of food and public health activists working on farm-to-school issues, to create programs that reach every student.
Farm-to-school supporters are gearing up to ask for it: State Reps. Tina Kotek (D-Portland) and Brian Clem (D-Salem) plan to introduce legislation in 2009 requesting that the state match a portion of the federal dollars if districts purchase Oregon foods. If the bill is enacted, the state would kick in as much as 15 cents for every lunch and 7 cents for every breakfast to purchase foods produced, packaged or processed in Oregon. The proposed legislation also would provide up to 150 grants for complementary food- and garden-based education, up to $10,000 a school year for each of two years.
Meanwhile, some Oregonians aren’t waiting. School gardens are taking root in pockets around the state, helped along by community members, passionate teachers and parent volunteers. With grants and donations, a new culinary arts program is getting off the ground in the Centennial district, with the hope of introducing at-risk teens to a lifetime of more healthful eating.
Stay tuned. Meanwhile, sample a few stories of change, below.
lesliecole@news.oregonian.com
Farm-to-school links:
Ecotrust (events, program overviews, assistance and legislative updates),
www.ecotrust.org/farmtoschool
National Farm to School Program
www.farmtoschool.org
Portland Public Schools’ Local Lunch program
www.nutrition.pps.k12.or.us/.docs/pg/10173
Growing Gardens’ school garden resource page
www.growing-gardens.org
(click on Resources, then School Gardens)
Bend/LaPine farm-to-school program
www.bend.k12.or.us
(click on Parents, Nutrition, Menus, and Farm to School)
Centennial Learning Center
www.centennial.k12.or.us/schools/clc
