Salisbury Elementary School, Salisbury, New Brunswick
2018-2019 (Grant Year 1)
The Farm to School grant to Salisbury Elementary school allowed us to expand our goals of providing food literacy to our students.
Students brainstormed ideas around promoting our Salad Bar. They created posters, songs and digital pictures. They started a “buy 5 salads and get one free” campaign and gave our food provider, Chartwell, lots of great salad theme ideas. A Garden Tower was also purchased to grow our own greens for our salad bar.
Our cooking club was also able to purchase a stove which gave us easy access to cook new recipes and talk about safety in the kitchen.
The highlight of the year was bringing in a new program, Apprenti en Action (Apprentice in Action), to teach our grade 3 and 4 immersion students about healthy, local foods and how to prepare them. Apprenti en Action is based on four pillars: education, health, sustainable, development and social entrepreneurship. The students learned basic knife skills, food safety, how to prepare nutritious snacks and the value of local foods. Some of our students who completed the program were invited to be the chefs at Inspiration Cafe to prepare the food for the Westmorland-Albert Inclusion Network‘s AGM!
The grant monies also allowed us to start up a healthy snack program for all our students. Volunteers and grade four student who completed the Apprenti en Action program helped us to prepare healthy snacks once a week, such as carrots and parsnips, sliced apples and yogurt dip as well as a delicious trail mix. It was a great hit and provided us with feedback on equipment, skills and volunteer hours required to sustain such an endeavour.
We had our first ever Farm to School week with local farmers, Great Minds Think Outside and Nutrients for Life providing our students with authentic, hands on learning about growing food (plants and animals), the importance of a healthy environment to our food system and how to plant and grow our own food. We now have our own strawberry patch with the help of a local farmer and a new three tiered composter built by our High School students!
The students completed the planting of our gardens in June and volunteers are helping our gardens to grow all summer. We look forward to the Fall when we can harvest vegetables for our salad bar, collect seeds and learn more about our environment.
Thank you to Farm to School for helping us meet our food literacy goals for our students!
