The following was co-written by my wife Tiffany Tyler, who is the chair of the board of the Central City Co-op and Carolyn Lambeth, the Director of Operations for Central City. It appeared on Monday as a guest post on The Lunch Tray, and now I’m running it here.
When You Take Food Out of the Cafeteria, It Becomes More Interesting
Every parent struggles at some point with getting their children to eat healthy food, particularly vegetables. Parents at Travis Elementary school, through the Health and Wellness committee of the PTA in their Heights-based HISD school, have the chance to influence their children’s eating in many ways. The committee members have created a number of projects designed to make good, healthy food part of the learning environment at Travis.
One of the most successful ways food has been integrated into the overall learning package at Travis is with the Kindergarten classes. The “tasting station” began as a small experiment at a single event and became part of a monthly outdoor learning event designed by teachers and parents to get the students to put learning in contexts outside the classroom. Each year since the program’s start, individual parent volunteers have put their own stamp on the tasting station, developing more tie-ins between food and the learning process. Travis parents have shown that creativity, setting and positive peer pressure can lead to positive results.
For the 100 or more kindergarteners working their way through art, math and language activities interspersed with trike races each month, the small table with food samples is just one of many “stations” to work through over their time outside. The table is spread with food samples and some sort of math or language linked activity. For instance, if the math lessons that month are about building graphs and making comparisons, the food samples might be “different types of apples.” Pieces of a variety of apple are available for anyone to taste, and each taster must then mark on an “opinion sheet” which one they liked best. The sheets then flow back to the classroom for the teachers to use to build a results graph in a later lesson.
Getting 100 kids to try different apples- granny smith, fuji and honeycrisp, for example, isn’t too hard. Most kids like fruit. The parent volunteer can also talk to the tasters about “sweet” and “sour” or “sweet, “sweeter” and “sweetest” (Boys always show a strong preference for sour.) Getting the children to talk about the food, what it tastes like and why they do or do not like it are a great way to open a dialogue with the kinders about food.
After apples, it’s time to get creative. For lessons about science, we might talk about “seeds we eat” and try sunflower, pumpkin and pomegranate. Pumpkin is an easy one to try in the fall- and even reluctant students often get motivated to try to eat “pumpkin guts.” The related classroom activity for teachers can be simple- sprouting a seed for the school garden and talking about what it tasted like, or related to geography of “where do pomegranates come from.” Different varieties of citrus fruits can be shown and tasted. We learned that a lot of Travis boys like grapefruit- something most of them had not had before at home. Another interesting compare and contrast is “raw versus cooked,” where students might be asked to put their opinion on the data collection sheet about “which is sweeter” for raw versus cooked carrots or even broccoli. It only takes a few brave kids to try the broccoli in front of their friends and declare that “it really is sweet!” to get LOTS of interested takers to see if it is true.
The other wonderful tie-in here is that food comes from the land. Recent Travis parent volunteers have come from Central City Co-op, Houston’s oldest organic produce co-op, where many offerings are locally sourced. A tasting station on sweet potatoes, brought from a local farm via the Co-op, included dirty raw potatoes, a discussion of how they were grown and a picture of the farmer. Spring months provide opportunities for tasting different local lettuces and herbs, some of which are grown in the school garden. Even bitter greens or herbs can be presented in a way that makes children want to taste them- “leaves we eat” can be evaluated for bitter, sweet or spicy. Spinach with the roots attached can link back to seasonal growing and the farmer whose hands did the work to grow the plant.
Investing time in teaching the Travis kindergarten students to try new foods in this way has reaped strong rewards. Over 90% of the students tasted what was on offer at each of the 2009-2010 school year tastings. For some, the specific foods on offer were not new. For others, it was the first time they had seen some of the particular items. But every month, the presence of kids happily munching what was on offer and making their “observations” and “decisions” about the foods inspired others to try new things. No one had to try anything, and yet almost everyone did. And many discovered that they liked Thai spinach, plain roasted sweet potato, pomegranate seeds, romaine lettuce and yes, even broccoli.