Rickson Ridge Grade 2 Classroom Visit

On January 20^th Garden2Table did the first outreach program in the community this year.  The team spent the morning with 21 grade 2 students at Rickson Ridge Public School.  The class was fortunate and had visited the garden in the fall semester. We started by having the class break into smaller groups and visually depict what they remembered from the garden.  The students drew a vegetable and were asked to draw what the vegetable needs to grow.  Carrots were definitely the most popular vegetable amongst the class!  The students did an excellent job and drew sun, rain, soil and some garden critters like worms and bees.

After chatting about plants and what they need to grow we moved onto the next activity: planting!  The kids were each given a plastic cup labeled with their name.  We went around and filled the cups with soil and gave the kids green bean seeds.  The students pushed the seeds into the soil against the plastic so they could observe the seed sprout and grow.  We discussed taking care of the plant and what to expect, roots, a stem and hopefully some green beans over the next few weeks.

For our last activity we made a salad dressing together and the students made their own salad with many different vegetables.  A highlight of making the salad dressing was shaking up the dressing to emulsify it (check out video below). This was a lot of fun and the kids were able to try some vegetables that they had never seen before! Some highlights were radishes and avocados.

Here's the salad dressing recipe we used:

-       ¼ cup red wine vinegar

-       ¾ cup olive oil

-       1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

-       Pinch of sugar

-       Pinch of salt

-       Pinch of pepper 

We hope we can bring some more programming to other classrooms over the next semester!