Back to School Resources

Looking for ideas to bring outdoor learning up a notch at your school this fall? Or creative ways to engage with students around farm, food, and nutrition education during this school year? 

As part of the COVID-19 mitigation plan, school staff is encouraged to incorporate the outdoors as much as is reasonable in their instruction or daily routines this fall. Our Farm to School Resource Hub is a great place to look for ideas and support for outdoor learning, school gardens, and cooking with students during COVID-19.

Here are a few of our favorites:

• Cultivating Joy and Wonder: Free downloadable resource book with over 75 classroom food, farm, and nutrition activities. This book is a great one-stop resource for elementary school teachers interested in incorporating more Farm to School education into their curriculum.

• Teaching Outside 101: A 15-page guide from the Bonnyvale Environmental Education Center (BEEC) all about how to get your classroom outside.  This guide covers the nitty-gritty logistics of outdoor education and idea starters for outdoor lessons in each academic subject.

• Cooking with Students: Guidelines developed by Food Connects in partnership with the VT FTS Network to help teachers cook with kids while staying COVID-19 safe.

We also want to highlight Discover Dairy’s Adopt a Cow program. This free program provides an exciting, year-long experience for the classroom where students get an inside look at dairy farming while paired with a calf from a Vermont dairy farm.  Classrooms receive regular progress updates, cow photos, live chats from the farm, activity sheets for students, suggested lessons that follow Common CORE standards, and opportunities to write letters to the calf. Register for this school year by September 15.

We are wishing you all a healthy start to the 2021-2022 school year!

Open for Business: BUHS Farmstand Persists Throughout Remote Learning

Remember the last time you split a restaurant bill with friends—how long did it take? If it’s anything like my experiences, it always ends up being far more complicated than expected. Now, imagine splitting the grocery bill for 30 teachers and divvying up cases of potatoes, mushrooms, asparagus, arugula, and more. Add in special orders (Terra Nova coffee, anyone?) and delivery, and you’ve got the Brattleboro Union High School’s (BUHS) Virtual Farmstand. 

Despite the pandemic restrictions, BUHS students in the F.A.R.M.S program (Foundations of Agriculture, Reading, Math, and Social Engagement), with the help of teachers Alison Kelly, Erica Cross, and Lauren Allembert, managed the school’s buying, which sold over $2,500 worth of local food to school staff over the past year. School staff would place their orders via a Google Sheet developed by Food Connects, and the Food Connects Food Hub would then deliver the bulk order directly to the school. From there, students handled all communications to the staff, measured and packed individual orders, and sent invoices to their customers. Taken all together, the BUHS Farmstand is a standout example of how Farm to School in the upper-grade levels can be interdisciplinary, hands-on, and engaging for the entire school community. 

“The Farmstand was an anchor for many of our students this past year. Not only did it keep learning hands-on during the pandemic, but it helped our students build community within the school." says BUHS teacher Lauren Allembert. 

Students practiced their math skills—dividing orders, measuring out correct weights, and tallying up invoices. The class had to create systems to manage the flow of fresh produce through the classroom and back out to customers. Individuals honed their communication skills via emails to teachers and when delivering orders.

School staff were excited to support the students in their real-world learning. Added benefits for the school community included an easy way to buy local foods and lower prices since they were buying directly from the Food Hub. 

The F.A.R.M.S. program does much more Farm to School as well. Students grow crops in raised beds built by the Windham Regional Career Center, practice culinary skills using local foods, and learn about the natural sciences through the lens of horticulture. The program is also open to a wide audience, explains Allembert, “the F.A.R.M.S. program creates an opportunity for all students in our community to engage at any level. Students have taken sustainability coursework, participated in the farmstand, and others have completed community service within the C.S.A."

Looking to next year, the class is excited to get their farmstand back in person. While the virtual format was an innovative pandemic solution, the sense of community fostered through the physical stand can’t be replaced.

Resource Roundup—6 Tools to Help Teachers

Since the pandemic closed schools in March, teachers nationwide are shifting their practice and adapting instruction to fit virtual and physically distanced settings. Food Connects maintains a running list of professional development opportunities in our monthly newsletter (scroll to the bottom!) but we also wanted to highlight some other tools that have made their way into classrooms this year. Read on to check out six new tools to help teachers adapt to COVID-19. 

Teaching Outside 101 (Bonnyvale Environmental Education Center - BEEC)

Drawing upon over 20 years of experience, BEEC put together a 15-page guide to getting your classroom outside. The first half of this guide covers the nitty-gritty logistics of outdoor education—from establishing natural boundaries in your new outdoor classroom, to supply lists for teachers and students. The second half of the guide covers idea starters for outdoor lessons in each academic subject.  

What we appreciate about this resource is that it is not overwhelming and covers just enough to get you thinking about how to improve your practice and routines with outdoor education. Each topic gets you thinking about a particular aspect of teaching outdoors (ie: travel to the forest) and offers a few idea starters (challenge them to walk like a ____ dog/cat/deer/mouse/etc.) without ever being exhaustive. 

Cooking with Students (Food Connects)

In response to requests from our member schools, Food Connects created a 2-page guideline on how to safely cook with students during COVID-19. The guidelines touch upon the following topics: Students in the Garden, Cooking in the Classroom, Eating in the Classroom, Cooking Outside, and Utensil Sanitation. Our intention is to empower teachers and administrators to make safe decisions for their school while keeping cooking and hands-on nutrition education a part of student learning. Once you feel confident about bringing cooking back into your classroom, the next two resources will help identify recipes to try. 

Indigenous Harvest of the Month (NH Farm to School and Indigenous NH Collaborative Collective) 

Released earlier this year, this collection of resources from NH Farm to School and Indigenous NH Collaborative Collective focuses on the traditional crops of the Abenaki tribe. Some of these may already be a familiar sight in your school garden or around campus—others, a new learning opportunity for your students. We love the resource’s background on each harvest, the inclusion of nutritional information, as well as the crop’s historical context.

Farm to School programming is rooted in the land, yet too often the history and stories of those who have lived here (wherever “here” may be) for millennia are overlooked. By teaching their history and elevating their work, we remind students of a Native American culture that is still thriving today. 

Celebrating our Roots: Multicultural Recipe Book (Burlington School District - BSD) 

Created by BSD teachers in partnership with the University of Vermont, this recipe book highlights dishes from around the world, representing the home countries of many BSD families. Like the Indigenous Harvest of the Month materials, the book pairs each recipe with facts about the dish, an explanation of its cultural significance, and suggested learning activities. 

Classroom Compost Buckets (WSWMD)

Windham Solid Waste Management District has classroom compost buckets available. As schools relocate lunch to the classroom, teachers and facilities staff are rethinking how waste is collected. Send an email to John at WSWMD (recyclewswmd@icloud.com) to get one for your classroom as well as other resources such as signage for your waste sorting station. 

Sails for Schools (Wild Carrot Farm)

Jesse from Wild Carrot Farm donated sails (from sailboats) to schools to use as shelters this fall. They’re all spoken for the time being but the next time he’s able to get more—likely sometime in the spring—Food Connects will help distribute them. If you’re interested in one for your outdoor classroom, send us a message at farmtoschool@foodconnects.org.