Marie Reed Elementary School

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FoodPrints

FRESHFARM’s FoodPrints is a food and nutrition education program that aims to make positive changes in what children and their families eat through hands-on experiences with growing, harvesting, cooking, and eating nutritious, local and seasonal foods. We work in partnership with administrators and teachers to ensure that FoodPrints is relevant and enriching; meets Common Core, Next Generation Science, Environmental Literacy, and DCPS/OSSE Health standards. FoodPrints nourishes minds and bodies. All students in Pre-K3 through grade 5 participate in FoodPrints once a month for the whole school year.

Rebeca Gore is the FoodPrints teacher at Marie Reed Elementary School. She was born and raised in Washington DC, just a few blocks away from Marie Reed. She always had an appreciation for food, since her family made gathering to share a meal every evening a priority. She graduated from the College of William and Mary with a Health Science Degree in 2016 and fluent in Spanish, with the intention of working in health education. During the 2016-17 school year, as a FoodCorps member, she served at Marie Reed where she built solid connections with the students, staff, and families. Now as the Lead Foodprints Teacher there, Rebeca is excited to be serving in the community where she grew up by exploring food traditions, gardening, harvesting, and preparing nutritious food — all to help students and families learn to nourish themselves and enhance academic learning.

To provide students with the best experience possible, we need parent volunteers for each class.

Our hope is to have parents all volunteer in at least one FoodPrints class this year! We think of FoodPrints as a field trip that doesn’t require leaving the school (and just requires a few hours of your time). Please consider volunteering when your classroom teacher provides you with his/her FoodPrints schedule. Students will be so happy to have their parents come in to help, and we will always reward you with something tasty to eat.

We are a community-supported program. This year, FoodPrints at Marie Reed is generously supported by DCPS, the city, Instacart, and Washington’s Green Grocer, along with private foundations. We rely on the generosity of funders and sponsors to support the program at Marie Reed and our other partner schools, and we always invite new sponsors to work with us. FoodPrints will also be funded through the 2018-2019 school year, after which new private sources of funding will need to be secured.

Here are some of the types of lessons we teach:

• Pre-K and Kindergarten: We believe that it is critically important to provide our youngest learners with positive, hands-on experience with the foods we want to them eat more of throughout their lives.   Planting, harvesting, chopping and tasting fresh, nutritious foods is a uniquely engaging experience for young children at school, and teachers have found that FoodPrints experiences immediately become part of their students’ play experiences back in their classrooms.

• 1st Grade: Identifying parts of plants, eating different parts of different edible plants, scientific observational drawing, dissecting /labeling seeds, composting/worm bins

• 2nd Grade: Understanding how plants grow and what they depend on, scientific drawing and labeling of plants in the garden, decomposition/soil, world cuisine

• 3rd Grade: Food choices that support the health of our bodies/planet, charting growth over time, making predictions

• 4th Grade: The garden ecosystem (soil, compost/ decomposition, germination, photosynthesis, and pollination), descriptive language, companion planting, building models

• 5th Grade: Food history and family food traditions, Westward expansion, math in the kitchen and garden, following directions, independent cooking skills