Farm-to-table classes have kids ‘eating that salad like it was ice cream and candy’

Not many first-graders get to make presentations to the state Board of Education, but in the spring, 60 Heatherstone Elementary students took a rare opportunity to share their newfound knowledge of Kansas agriculture with the academic committee.

“We want the state of Kansas to add teaching ideas on how to use agriculture to teach social studies,” said Nancy Smith, first-grade teacher at Heatherstone.

Having a year of a farm-to-table focus in the classroom combined with their first taste of advocacy made for a unique educational experience.

“Getting to board that bus and go to Topeka and see the capital and go to the Board of Education — that opened a world to them that they absolutely would not have experienced (otherwise),” said Toni Cole, principal of Heatherstone. “It wasn’t just, ‘Learn this line so we can do this performance.’ They deeply understood what they had been learning.”

That’s just one reason the school recently received the Civic Advocacy Network Award from the Kansas Department of Education.

It started because Smith felt kids should know where their food comes from, especially in a state with such an agriculture-based economy. She hopes that when the next curriculum revision cycle comes around, the state will consider her suggestions.

“Our kids can walk a little bit out of our neighborhood and see crops growing, yet they’ve never been in a corn field. They don’t know the whole planting, harvesting — how that actually gets to your plate. They don’t understand that there’s a difference between popcorn and sweetcorn,” Smith said.

She’s worked hard to bring in different educational experiences, from having kids dissect cornstalks to visiting the National Agricultural Center and Hall of Fame in Bonner Springs. Now, she’s seeing the dividends.

“You could wave different crops in front of our now second-graders, and they would be able to tell (the difference). They know what a soybean is, what wheat is, what corn is. They all know what bacon comes from,” Smith said.

Before their activities, Smith said, most of the kids thought bacon came from cows.

The school also has hydroponic tower gardens, where kids choose seeds to grow, then nurture plants to fruition. When all the plants have matured, the kids have a salad party. Spinach, kale, lettuce: The kids loved it.

“They were eating that salad like it was ice cream and candy,” Smith said.

Activities have stretched outside the first-grade classrooms to include the whole school. In March, Smith set up 15 stations at the front of the school for everyone to try. They included a pretend farmers’ market and a corn kernel matching game.

“Everything we did, we documented and shared with the entire school, whether we shared it with poster boards in the library, in newsletters with pictures or we invited different grades levels to come down to our grade level,” Smith said.

They have a special agriculture night planned in April with local food distributors in attendance. A similar event planned for last school year got canceled as a result of a snow day.