Field Trip Season- Complete!

The 2010 school year is over, which means a change of pace for my work here at CAFF. Since my work is focused on our farm-to-school program, summer is a welcome respite from farm field trips. Over the course of the past month or so, we hosted at least sixteen field trips with an average of 60 kids on each-- that's almost a thousand kids!

This year we picked these four activity stations, which the students rotate through:
(1) Plant Part Relay Race
(2) Strawberry Parfait Making Snack Station
(3) Worm Bin Exploration
(4) Farm Riddles

Here's a picture from the Farm Riddles station-- students are presented with clues about a vegetable growing in the field and have to figure out which one it is and do a scientific drawing of it. This picture is courtesy of Travis E. Smith, who is doing a cool photography project you can check out at www.tesmithphoto.com.

I've received tons of great feedback from teachers and parents, but nothing compares to elementary school students talking up which vegetables they've tried and what their favorites are. I heard a statistic once (you can find it somewhere in Raj Patel's book Stuffed and Starved) that suggested that for every $1 spent advertising healthy food to children, $500 was spent advertising to them for the unhealthy stuff. What I've realized is that assisting kids in experiencing where their food comes from is the ultimate in advertising 'healthy' as 'cool', and I couldn't be happier to be a facilitator.