Skip to main content

Harvest Season in Full Swing at Somerville Public Schools!

By
We’ve had a busy Fall season in the gardens! This week will wrap up the final, yet very important, chore of “putting the garden to bed”! Parent volunteers, students, and educators have been hard at work since the beginning of school, harvesting and tasting a variety of vegetables, saving tomato seeds, and planting garlic! Now it’s time to say goodnight to the gardens, as we learn about the importance of cover crops, mulching, and how some plants survive during the winter. Lower elementary school students have been engaged and directly involved in making sure our gardens stay healthy over the winter until we wake them up in the Spring!

We also celebrated our annual Corn Shucking and Local Harvest Day! With the help of community partner volunteers (Groundwork, Shape Up, UMass), parents, and students we shucked over 3,000 ears of corn before school even started! The children enjoyed the fruits of their labor with a local beef burger for lunch! Corn Shucking is always a favorite day of the school year for student and staff, and this year proved no different. Thanks to garden champion and parent volunteer, Jen, we have the Healey School's corn data, by the numbers:

number of ears shucked:  480  (8 bags w 60 ears each, the kids did the math)
number of minutes to shuck 480 ears of corn: 32
number of student shuckers:  30 give or take
number of volunteer shuckers: 4
number of staff: 5
number of corn earworms found: 4
corny jokes recited:  2
amount of fun had at Healey on Corn Shucking Day: some things can't be measured.



Local Happenings:
Concord, Massachusetts will host the Farm-Based Education Conference on November 4th-6th. 
This will be a great opportunity for anyone interested in effectively incorporating gardening into daily school curriculum.


Drumlin Farms, who provides farm fresh veggies to our salad bars, has a long list of exciting classes to meet everyone’s interests! Register here. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mindful Eating: Part 1

By
In order to digest your food properly, your body must be in parasympathetic mode, or in a state of non-stress. Kindergartners know this. Well, they might not know the scientific term yet, but during lunch they participate in 6 minutes of silence; a period they call "Mindful Eating". When asked why they like mindful eating, the children replied, because "it’s quiet”, “I can enjoy my food better”, “I get peace and quiet”, and "it’s calmly”. Kindergartener teacher Ms. Scrima, and other Kennedy School teachers have been implementing mindfulness in the cafeteria and their classrooms since last year. They are proud to have a lunch period that looks and sounds quite different from the chaotic cafeteria rush other classes often experience. While the students sit silently at the lunch table checking in with their emotions, their digestive systems are also benefitting. Physiologically, only when our bodies are in rest mode can the brain trigger the release of digestive ...
1 comment
Read more

Argenziano After-School Art Club Creates Mosaics for School Garden

By Karyn
In Ms. Diana Taremi’s Art Club it’s all about line, form, color and composition. More than a dozen middle school students started on several projects on Monday afternoons; creating art both for themselves and making projects to beautify the school. Their first assignment: Georgia O’Keefe-style painting on large canvases for the first floor hallway. The bright, lush flower canvasses are still works in progress.   The students are also creating flower tile mosaics that will be set in cement and used as stepping stones in the school’s kitchen garden. Ms.Emily Bhargava, a mosaic artist from Somerville, donated her time and bags and boxes of materials; tiles from large to small to the art club for the project. On a recent afternoon, Ms. Bhargava spent an afternoon at Art Club teaching Ms. Taremi and the students how to assemble the mosaics. First the students painted large pictures of flowers. They covered these with plastic wrap to protect them; then layered mesh on...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program (FFVP)

By Karyn
Students at Argenziano, East Somerville Community School and Winter Hill Community Innovation School tasted ripe, fresh picked strawberries, organic oranges, crunchy celery as well as many other fresh fruits and vegetables this school year as part of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program (FFVP).  All students at the three schools were offered a fresh fruit or vegetable as a midmorning snack Monday through Friday.  Students gushed with enthusiasm about the program and voraciously consumed the fresh fruits and vegetables on a daily basis!   We are excited to announce that the FFVP will be continued at Argenziano, ESCS and WHCIS during the 2014-2015 school year!   The goals of the FFVP are to establish lifelong healthy eating habits and to fight childhood obesity since it promotes healthy eating habits among students by introducing a variety of produce on a regular basis, giving students an opportunity to try fruit...
1 comment
Read more