Stephanie Alexander, well-known chef and food writer, wants young children to learn how to grow, cook and eat good food every day of their lives. The best way to encourage children to choose food that is healthy is to engage them in fun, hands-on experiences in growing, harvesting, preparing and sharing fresh, delicious food from the earliest possible age.
This unique collaboration with the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation will support the establishment of the Kitchen Garden Program in our school. At the heart of the Program is a beautiful, productive vegetable and bushtucker garden, which we have established over the past four years in the school, and the construction of a kitchen which we are set to fit out. This kitchen will enable the kids to cook the produce they have grown and sit together to share healthy and delicious meals.
The benefits of this program for the children are truly exciting. It will:
- Introduce children to a wide range of foods, smells, textures and sensations
- Teach practical kitchen skills such as chopping, stir frying, grilling as well as social skills
- Build students build self-esteem, confidence and a sense of achievement through
- kitchen and garden activities
- Help students to understand the connection between care in the garden, flavour on a
- plate and a healthy planet. Seeing the future is dependent on building mutually
- responsible and sustainable patterns of living.
- Teach them responsibility for their own physical well being
- Provide new exciting avenues for core subject learning such as maths, writing, science, and human society and environment.
You can help
Whether you can lend us a hand with your time, goods or services to build and fit out our kitchen, help enlarge our already established veggie garden, or spend an hour a week to help the kids cook in the kitchen or dig in the garden, any help will be greatly appreciated and extremely rewarding. This fantastic program has been operating for some time in Victorian schools and we want the local community to share in the development of this exciting project at our school.