Mmmmsmoothies!

Holt Community Gardens’

Superfood Smoothie

Ingredients: (Serves 2)

1 small beet

2 leaves kale (stem removed)

1 handful frozen raspberries

2 frozen bananas

½ cup plain, nonfat yogurt

Orange juice (the more you add, the less thick the smoothie will become)

Instructions: Add all ingredients to a blender and blend until smooth. Using frozen fruit makes the smoothie thicker. If you use unfrozen fruit, your smoothie will simply be runnier and slimier textured – but still delicious! Yogurt makes it creamier too, but you can easily leave it out if you don’t want to eat dairy. Experiment with this recipe and add all kinds of fruits and greens. You can also use other types of juice besides orange juice.

This smoothie is PACKED with nutrients and SUPER healthy. Drink it anytime!

Blended, not stirred.

- by Sophia Gill

MARCH-ing INTO SPRING

It’s just about time to start planting our spring garden. Unfortunately for me, weeds have proliferated to such an extent that I’m afraid to even lift the frost cloth to see really just how much needs to be done. “One step at a time” is the mantra that saves me from hiding in my closet of an office all spring…

Nitrogen fixing cover crop at Holt.

Garden Club was slow this winter, but I have high hopes that students will be scrambling to get involved once it gets warm enough to go outside again. It’s amazing what a 10-year-old boy will accomplish when you give him a hoe and a pile of dirt. Students have been starting seeds indoors and learning to prune blueberry bushes, blackberry bushes, and apple trees. We’ve been trying wild new things like tofu, eggplant, and sweet potato fries with the skins on! This week, we’ll create an enlarged map of the garden to plan out where we will transplant all of our seedlings in the coming months. Soon, our pile of weeds, cover crop, and old lettuce will be transformed into the productive garden we’ve been dreaming about.

In the classroom, I’ve worked with math classes to map the garden to practice proportions, ratios, and scale. In science classes, we’ve discovered the caloric content of Cheetos and walnuts by burning them using a homemade calorimeter. The calorimeter lesson was part of the 6^th grade energy unit and gave the students a better understanding of what calories are and how they act as an energy source for our bodies. Students were able to observe that a walnut burns for about four times as long as a Cheeto, and connect that observation with the understanding that eating a walnut will give you energy for longer than eating a Cheeto. We then had an economics debate, coming up with arguments for why one might prefer to buy Cheetos over walnuts as a snack and vice versa.

Teaching this lesson made it obvious how little most students know about energy balance and nutrition. Many students were surprised to learn that our bodies are burning calories constantly, not only when we “exercise.” Although many 6^th graders maintained their loyalty to junk food on the grounds of taste, there were several students who showed a level of curiosity about nutrition and health that should be nurtured. Unfortunately, these topics are not given their due in schools these days when there’s not even enough time to fit in the number of minutes of physical activity mandated by the federal government each week, so the more we can sneak them into core subjects, the better.

Last but not least, our very own Arkansas Fellow, Rachel Spencer, was head chef at my last hands-on cooking class for Holt Families. Thank you Rachel for showing our lovely families that Southerners can eat vegetarian, and without giving up the BBQ sauce!

- by Sophia Gill

FULL SPEED AHEAD

At long last, winter arrived - just in time for teachers to come flocking for garden integration in their classrooms! Despite the frosty weather, we find ways to bring food and nutrition education into the classroom without taking students outside…or at least by bundling everyone up sufficiently!

Despite the flu virus running rampant this season, the fall semester at Holt Middle School has gotten off to a promising start. We continue to move full speed ahead. The Title I budget committee at Holt agreed to allocate a thousand dollars towards garden integration in math classes. Very little curriculum has been created to bring middle school math topics into the garden in a way that meets national curriculum standards. To find inspiration, I use web-based as well as printed resources to compile my list of lesson ideas. Distributing these ideas last week, along with a verbal pitch at a department meeting, yielded results that will keep me busy for months! I’ll be working with at least eight more teachers this semester to bring math and science classes out to the garden, along with bringing food and nutrition lessons into the classroom.

Yesterday, we took 5^th grade science classes out to the garden to do a garden relay race. They’ve been studying simple machines, so using garden tools for chores in the form of a fun relay race was a great application of what they’ve learned. Students used shovels (lever and wedge) and tumblers (axle) to turn the compost, wheelbarrows (lever, wheel and axle, and inclined plane) to transport compost, hand tools (lever and wedge) to weed, and tillers to till the soil. They will also do some data analysis with the times recorded during the races.

More than providing a real world application of their knowledge of simple machines, this activity gave kids who’ve never spent time outside digging in the dirt a chance to connect with nature and where our food comes from. I saw kids approach the soil tentatively and very unsure of themselves. Children should not be afraid of the soil that grew their food, so hopefully activities like these will start to demystify the natural world, while at the same time making it something to ponder and appreciate.

Later this week, I will be administering a taste test in 6^th grade math classes to start a discussion on the utility of surveying a random sample to make inferences about a larger population. I specifically chose food items that might be unfamiliar to the students to use this as an opportunity to expose them to new healthy snack options, for example, pistachios and persimmons. We will tally the students’ preferences to determine a class favorite, then graph the data and discuss its utility in predicting the preferences of a larger population.

Healthy Happenings at Holt Middle

Last month, I commented on how fast winter was approaching, but it appears that Arkansas still can’t seem to make up its mind about the season. Unseasonably warm weather means that Holt’s garden is still producing copious amounts of greens! Every week we harvest several lettuce varieties, spinach, and arugula for the cafeteria salad bar. This week, we celebrated our harvest with a salad extravaganza. I taught my students how to make homemade balsamic vinaigrette, which we used to dress the greens along with our garden grown carrots and a couple other vegetables donated by Ozark Natural Foods, a local grocery cooperative. We also harvested kale and learned how to bake kale chips! Exposing the students to this new vegetable in a form that is more familiar to them worked wonders. Not one student had a negative reaction. In fact, they were completely devoured in less than 30 seconds!

Contrast this experience with the week I made Lola Bloom’s massaged kale salad for the kids. It was a huge disappointment, because from the moment I had tasted that salad during FoodCorps orientation, I was excited to feed it to students. Almost all of my students rejected it. The flavor and texture was just too unfamiliar for their unadventurous palates. Being a huge fan of massaged kale salad myself, I was completely deflated. What kept me going was the small handful of kids who loved it and especially the girl who said: “If I can have my own restaurant when I grow up, I’m gonna put this kale salad on the menu.” I responded: “You mean when you own your own restaurant,” and “THAT’S AWESOME!” (my heart melts). Hearing this kept me from giving up, but the kale chip success re-inspired me.

Not only does Ozark Natural Foods help us out with ingredients for our Garden Club here and there, but they have also made possible free monthly cooking classes for Holt Middle School families. We offered our first class in November, and it went splendidly. Charles Ragland, a father of one of the students here at Holt, is a trained chef and led the class. All ages participated in cooking a nutritious, balanced meal. FoodCorps Service Member and Registered Dietician Ally Mrachek discussed the nutrition of the meal components, and everyone got to take home a recipe to make the meal at home. We look forward to offering these hands-on cooking classes every month from now on. From reading the feedback forms I had the attendees fill out, it’s obvious that people are very eager to learn how to make their meals healthier while still making them filling and delicious. With the help of Ozark Natural Foods and my colleagues here in Fayetteville, we will be able to get this information out to families and eat a delicious meal together while we’re at it!

Beautiful ingredients culminating in a tasty, healthy meal!

You can read about our class on the blog of Ozark Natural Foods as well. 

by Sophia Gill

Fall in full swing at Holt Middle!

Winter is coming fast, and we've had our work cut out for us here at Holt Community Gardens. We harvested our radishes, trying them plain and incorporating them into a radish dip to eat with cut up veggies. One student responded with an animated "ewwww" when I told her we would be snacking on radish dip that day, but after trying it, I couldn't get her hand out of the bowl! Our lettuce and kale are growing like crazy, so a group of students and I head out every Tuesday and Thursday morning before school to harvest for the cafeteria. 

Radishes destined for veggie dip, and Holt's lettuce harvest on the salad bar!

In the coming weeks, we will be able to harvest carrots and spinach, as well as a few volunteer chard plants to sauté during our club meeting. Students are learning about seed saving, mulching, data collection, season extension  and cold-tolerant plants. They've made veggie pizza and Holiday pumpkin soup from pumpkins that they baked themselves. Dedicated members of the Fayetteville community come out every week to serve as role models and helping hands for our students and us during these club meetings. 

Not only does garden work keep us busy, we have started integrating food and nutrition education into classes throughout the school. Our school district featured a story about my recent New World vs. Old World pizza lesson for 5th grade social studies classes. Check out the article here. 

New World versus Old World ingredients.

During the month of October, the school district enjoyed local apple tastings organized by FoodCorps service member Ally Mrachek and colleagues. At Holt, we took the tasting even further by incorporating it into a full science lab. The students practiced the scientific method by coming up with hypotheses for which apple they thought they would like the most. They then used the data collected from seeing, tasting, smelling, feeling, and hearing each type of apple to draw a conclusion. 

Pickled cucumber and carrots await a tasting
as part of 7th grade social studies classes. 

This week, I delivered a food preservation lesson to 7th grade social studies classes in conjunction with their unit on ancient Egypt. Their teachers discussed the ancient Egyptian practice of mummification, and I focused on how humans have used different methods of food preservation throughout history, ancient Egyptians included. I will show them how to pickle cucumbers and carrots, and then we will taste them!

I've found that bringing food lessons into the classroom helps students make connections between what they are learning in garden club and what our cafeteria serves, thereby increasing the relevance of the information in their everyday lives. Reaching these kids from every angle is the best way to make an impact and raise the next generation's awareness of how to keep the Earth and their bodies healthy. 

By Sophia Gill