This year I was blessed with the opportunity to be a volunteer with the program Food is Elementary under the Live Healthy Appalachia/ Live Healthy America organizations. Now that my school year is over I would love to share the wonderful experience I had teaching these children so many different things! The Food Is Elementary program is a 28 week program taught in the Athens elementary schools. The classroom I was assigned was a 2nd grade classroom at Alexander Elementary School. I have never had the opportunity to meet such wonderful children. My class had such a desire to learn and that really warmed my heart. I have taught my class fruits and vegetables and differences between them, how to properly cut and prepare foods with different types of knives, cooking in the kitchen rules and precautions, vitamins, minerals, different types of fat in foods, healthy foods from international cuisines from Brazil all the way over to Japan, how to plant your own garden and grow organic vegetables as a way to save money since healthy foods can be expensive, and vegetarian and vegan food options. It was amazing how much these children have learned since the cirriculum is slightly tough with a lot of information to learn when I arrived at their classroom every Thursday morning! Every week we make a dish together as a class. The children cut and prepare all the foods themselves (with our supervision of course). It was so cute to see them be tiny chefs every week and really enjoy all the different types of foods they got to eat! We made some weird dishes especially with our internatinal cuisine unit and it was so awesome to see them try many different foods and enjoy them. Coming back every week, it was great to hear about how they cooked with their parents and how their parents made the recipes we made in class for dinner! I have truly seen a difference in not only these children's lives, but also in their family's lives by learning and preparing all these healthy meals! Something that a student had told me that I found very interesting was that she had a love for onions! She told me that at home she ate onions like someone would eat an apple! I had asked her why and she said that she just loved onions so much even though they made her look like she was crying. I laughed and told her that was pretty silly and always gave her extra onions whenever we prepared a dish that had onions in it :)
Here is a picture of me and my second grade class!
