Sowing seeds for healthy habits: Farm to Early Care and Education
Editor’s note: This “Voices from the Field” guest blog is a part of our series highlighting the stories of Inside-Out conference presenters. Mindy Davis, LaKeasha Glaspie, and Natalie Pond will be presenting a poster entitled “Farm to Early Care and Education: One North Carolina county’s vision to connect young children to locally grown foods and nature based education through gardening” during the Inside-Out poster session on Tuesday, May 10.
At Kiddie Academy in Wilmington, North Carolina, children learn math by counting apples, conduct taste tests on herbs grown in their school garden, and enjoy lunches made of peppers that they harvested.
The students are lucky participants in the Farm to Early Care and Education program (F2ECE) at Smart Start of New Hanover County. F2ECE is an approach to early childhood care that seeks to enhance the health and education of young children by connecting them to local food and farms. In 2017, Smart Start started implementing F2ECE as one of our early childhood care services. We began with just one F2ECE partner program and have grown over the years to more than 10 participating F2ECE programs, ranging from center-based initiatives to family child care homes.
As our F2ECE Child Care Health Consultant LaKeasha Glaspie says, “When children learn these healthy eating habits early, it lasts a lifetime.” LaKeasha and her colleague Natalie Pond provide technical assistance, coaching, and support to teachers and directors.
Natalie’s favorite feature of F2ECE is the opportunities that it creates for nature play, which is beneficial for early childhood development and easy to implement because it’s full of on-the-spot, unplanned opportunities. Natalie recently told me the story of a visit she made to a child care center: “The children and I started looking for small sticks and ‘planting’ them in the dirt to create a mini stick forest. Such a simple activity, but they were using fine motor skills, cooperation, and science exploration. As we were huddled around the sticks, a teacher came over to investigate. She was surprised at how engaged they were for such a simple activity! I love opportunities like this that help to inspire the teachers to find learning in the everyday nature around them. In this sense, by using the children as my guide, they become teachers and leaders themselves.”
As Smart Start’s Early Care & Education Manager, I don’t get to play in the dirt, but I do get to see the fruits of the labor (pun intended) and how much it’s impacting the children and families. I get to hear the stories from the teachers about how they’re creating lesson plans on the vegetables they are going to grow, or planning a taste test when they harvest the cucumbers, or letting kids take home extra green beans with recipes for their families to cook.
April is National Garden Month, and our F2ECE partners are great examples of how exciting gardens can be, for both children and program staff alike. I love listening to the enthusiasm that the teachers and directors have when they start a garden and are changing their playground schedules so that each class can have a turn in it. Family child care homes with limited space use containers to plant vegetables while other programs with sandy ground utilize raised beds. Still others who have very shady playgrounds use mobile garden beds to move the plants around to catch the light.
Creating relationships with our local community garden experts, agriculture extension agencies and others has resulted in materials being donated, from seedlings to soil and tools to wood. We’ve been able to procure water barrels to use for watering, or materials for irrigation. We also rely on community volunteers to help with our garden builds. College students, garden enthusiasts, parents and anyone interested in enhancing children’s learning come together to create gardens that children will come to love. The volunteers likely won’t get to see the gardens grow, but that doesn’t stop the comradery that’s built when spending a few hours working with strangers on a Saturday morning.
Typical F2ECE programs rely heavily on local farmers for their produce and mentorship, but our coastal community has very few farms—yet another reason that F2ECE is such an important resource for young children in our county. Instead, we rely on local food hubs, nonprofits, and farmer’s markets to help connect children with fresh, healthy food. Each relationship we create leads us to others in the community who want to help provide healthy foods to young children.
Each program is growing, too. We’ve learned that while the programs may start with only a few staff members wanting to implement F2ECE, it quickly lights a fire with others in the organization. Soon, everyone in the center is enjoying tending to the gardens, researching the food being grown, tasting the fruits, and sharing extra resources with families. As Smart Start continues to expand F2ECE in our child care community, we’re branching out to host seed/seedling swaps and encouraging mentorships between programs. Even the smallest goal of having more fruits incorporated into meals is increasing children’s understanding of healthy eating—and that’s a success just as much as growing a garden that produces fruits and vegetables year-round.
There has been so much research showing that gardening is beneficial for children’s development, and we see those results in our programs. Beyond the traditional metrics—children’s increased time in nature, improved understanding of health and nutrition, and willingness to eat fruits and vegetables—our programs have also seen unexpected benefits, like improved attendance rates and reduced morning snack expenses.
A personal a-ha moment for me has been seeing how easy it is to start a garden, get the kids and teachers involved, and watch it grow from there… in all ways. Once the kids see and experience it from beginning to end, they really start to understand where their food comes from, how it tastes, what it looks like, and how to care for the plants in their gardens. One program decided to grow corn in their garden, and the organization’s director told me she was blown away by how high it grew! She enjoyed watching it happen, just like the kids in her program—they were all watching it grow together, as a community. That’s the power of a garden.
- Video: Smart Start’s Farm to Early Care and Education journey
- Research Digest: Gardening with and for children
- USDA’s Children and Adult Care Food Program for nutritious meal reimbursements
- Toolkit: Green schoolyards advocacy
- Resources and inspiration at KidsGardening.org
- Web page: Learning outside and nature play
- Resource Hub: Children, food, and nature
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