First graders at Farmington View Elementary School in Hillsboro, Ore., recently enjoyed a salad bar in the lunchroom cafeteria that included lettuce they had planted as part of a cross-curricular project, Oregon Live reports.
It sort of gives new meaning to “farm-to-table,” and according to one teacher, who said she was more excited about the project than her students (kids don’t get excited about green leafy things), it was historic. “I’ve taught here 27 years and we’ve never had anybody grow food and serve it in the cafeteria,” the paper quoted Robin Davies, the first-grade teacher who initiated the project, as saying.
It all started in mid-February, when students planted three types of lettuce seeds in milk cartons in their classroom. The main point was a math lesson: counting seeds, planting so many seeds equally among the milk cartons, and so on. But students also learned about the plant life cycle in science as well as nutrition, inspired in part by Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” program.
Once the seeds had germinated, the first graders took a field trip out to Blooming Farm in nearby Cornelius in March. The starts were planted in garden beds and harvested on May 5.
Ms Davies has planned an expansion for next year, adding radishes, carrots, and peas, Oregon Live reported. This year, 26 of her 28 students tasted the lettuce in class, which is a remarkable number. They were “beaming,” she said, when they saw other people eating food they had helped grow, so I would predict the number of students who will try the radishes, carrots, and peas next year to be about the same. We’ll see.