Creepy Carrots

I ran an afternoon program at the farm on Wednesday afternoon, which just happened to be Halloween.  It is funny to be gathering eggs and herbs and making mini frittatas with seven year olds on the biggest candy day of the year, but we succeeded!  I linked the holiday to the garden using a read-aloud of Creepy Carrots! by Aaron Reynolds and Peter Brown.

While we were waiting for our eggs to cook, I prompted the children to draw their own scary vegetables.  They loved the prompt - and they began using alliteration to develop more scary vegetables, from scary sunflowers and terrifying tomatoes to zombie zucchini and lurking lettuce.

It had been a while since I was able to create a literacy prompt like this - and it was so engaging for the kids!  I hope to create a prompt like this every week of this program.

Do you have read-alouds that you love about nature or food?

book love.

I came across this book, Fanny at Chez Panisse, at the library the other day and I am in love.  Its like Maira Kalman meets Moosewood.

Now that there isn't a day that goes by where I don't cook with kids, this book jumped out at me, and I'm glad it did.  Alice Waters was a massive part of the Edible Schoolyard movement, which we are, in a way, trying to emulate up here in northwest Washington.  And we don't need to be making incredible fancy things with our electric skillet at our picnic table.  We need to be celebrating what the kids can take out of the ground, and offer them the best tasting things we can get our hands on when the garden doesn't have enough to sustain us.

A garden in the pacific northwest in May and June isn't exactly pumping out food.  Is a tricky thing to balance what to buy at a store and bring, and what to skip.  There are so many potential "purposes" of garden education.  I think what we're trying to do is emphasize seed-to-table, and sometime that means that we may plant tomatoes and then eat tomatoes I've bought from the store.  As much as I'd like to say that I don't buy tomatoes in the winter, I do.  Perhaps that will change someday, but I do not have a personal garden.  Its also important to remember that we are not trying to blow children's minds with where their food comes from.  We're trying to get them to enjoy things that they grow.

As you can probably tell, I'm settling into the job.  It is an amazing opportunity and I live in an amazing town, and I hope that I'll be sharing more again soon!