On your last nature walk, did you find any plants that made your heart sing? Have you revisited them to see them grow and bloom? It’s beginning to look like summer with blooms, fruits and all kinds of plant delights. What will you spot in your neighbourhood?
Cook. Healthy. Edible. Food. That’s what the CHEF in Project CHEF stands for. It’s called an acronym. We think that the words stand for what Project CHEF is all about. An acrostic poem starts with a word and this is the topic of the poem. The letters of the word become the first letter of each line of the poem. The word or phrase in each line of the poem is related to the word topic.
Sometimes you just want to do a quiet, relaxing activity all by yourself. The ingredients you find in your fridge or garden, and kitchen tools you find in the drawers or cupboards can provide you with inspiration and objects for drawing.
Some of the classes of students we teach come to the Project CHEF kitchen to gather a few ingredients we’ll be cooking with that day and some of the kitchen tools we will be using. They take them back to their classroom and set them out in different areas in the classroom. Students silently choose what they want to draw, open their food journal and sketch what they are looking at.
A magical spell comes over the classroom as students really focus on what they are looking at and drawing what they see. You dare not make a sound as creative minds are at work and a calm tone prevails in the room.
Scientists keep records, so do farmers, and so do we! Since planting your potatoes, what have you noticed? What can you observe? After planting your seed potatoes, in Part 1 of this activity, your Project CHEF task over the next two months is to look closely, pay attention to the details, and write down your observations. The more specific, the better.
It’s almost Mother’s Day. What are you doing for your mum this year? It’s a tricky year, how can we get creative with what we have at home to show our loved ones gratitude? Well, we are still grocery shopping. If you have some paint and paper around the house, try making some veggie prints for a card. This is a 5-star kid-approved activity. The flower pictured above is made from dipping a bok choy stem in paint and then pressing it into paper with a little twist (just like a stamp).
An Apple A Day Keeps The Doctor Away
Have you ever heard of this expression? An apple is a fruit and is not only delicious, but packs a punch in nutrition as well. Fruit is an important part of a healthy eating pattern. It contains nutrients such as fibre, vitamins and minerals that are needed to fuel our bodies and stay healthy. Technically speaking, a fruit is a seed-bearing part of a flowering plant that is edible. Fruit is fun to explore with its many flavours, shapes, textures and sizes. Try to eat a wide variety of colours to give your body all the nutrients it needs. The term used to describe this is ‘Eat the Rainbow’.
How do we know what we should eat each day? Canada’s Food Guide guides people to eat colourful, flavourful and wholesome food every day. The Food Guide is based on science and it tells us to be sure to eat food from three food groups to get the different nutrition our body needs to grow and stay healthy. Let’s take a look at Canada’s Food Guide and then we’ll use our Food Journal to track the colours of the rainbow we eat in a week.
BC is blessed with a bounty of good food grown right on our doorstep. We get to enjoy what our farmers grow and producers make throughout the year. Many of these ingredients we recognize right away but others may cause us to pause, look at carefully and do a little research to find out what they are and how can we enjoy eating them.
Spring has sprung: magnolias, cherry blossoms, forsythia, OH MY! Get outside for some fresh air and explore the plants in your neighbourhood. Remember to bring your parents, of course.
Have you noticed that plants are glowing bright green with new growth, some already flowering, and some just tiny seed leaves in the ground? As you know, at Project CHEF we are all about good food. Sometimes when we are at the grocery store, choosing produce shipped from Peru and maybe covered in plastic, those bright spring leaves seem completely disconnected from the food we eat. But the challenge is to look again.
We’re crazy about carrots at Project CHEF and we celebrate them weekly in our program. In this post you will find many activities to get you learning more about this tasty BC vegetable.