With school out for summer as of Thursday, students at Brentwood Elementary have also wrapped up their harvest season.
Thanks to a partnership between Growing Chefs and Let's Patch, a Grade 1 class at Brentwood Elementary grew their own vegetables this season.
Growing Chefs is a Vancouver non-profit group that teaches kids how to grow their own food. Let's Patch is the brainchild of Kent Houston, who came up with a self-watering planter for container gardening.
Let's Patch donates containers to schools, and Growing Chef visits classrooms every two weeks to teach the students about plant growth, nutrition, urban agriculture and sustainability.
The participating class at Brentwood grew arugula, spinach, beets, mes-clun, (a mustard-flavoured green, not to be confused with mescaline, the hallucinogenic), radishes, and sugar snap peas and regular snap peas. (They also grew potatoes as part of a related program.)
The harvest was used in a cooking class in mid-June, where students, with the help of parent-volunteers, washed the vegetables, prepped them and set up an eating area.
Other students were tasked with bringing the vegetables from the garden to the kitchen.
The students made pea soup and a stirfry. (The chefs cooked the stirfry, but the children were allowed to drop the vegetables in.)
The parents, chefs, students, teacher and education assistant all enjoyed a meal afterwards.
"I thought it was amazing," said teacher Priscilla Yap. "It's the first year I've done it, and I've already told all the other teachers (to do it)," she said.
The program helped kids try things they may otherwise refuse to taste, she explained.
"By the end of the program and going through each of the taste tests . I found it to be really helpful," she said.
Fun fair
Byrne Creek Secondary held a fun fair on June 11.
It wasn't a fundraiser or a community awareness event, it was just to reward students at the end of the school year.
Kids from all grades came out to try their hands at the mechanical bull, a dunk tank, a trampoline, and a race where participants are attached to bungee cords.
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