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• Once a week, make a healthful snack in the classroom or have a student and parent sign up to do this together. (For inspiration, see Healthful Snacks Are Elementary. )
• Find a farmer, chef, or other food producer willing to visit the classroom or host a field trip. Also brainstorm people or organizations you can call on for help. For instance, parents, university students, or older schoolmates might volunteer to help on cooking days; nutritionists or Cooperative Extension staff can offer advice or meet with students.
• Focus on a monthly food “celebrity.” (See Edible Celebrity, below.)
• Teach students about eating a rainbow of colorful, healthful foods. (See Taste the Flavor Rainbow).
• Visit a grocery store and try to find out the origins of different produce items. (See this activity: Food Roots and Routes.) You’ll also find other hands-on “local foods” activities in the same online publication.
• Invite students to explore food labels and advertising strategies. Stay tuned: Activities on this theme will appear this spring on Kidsgardening.com!
• Find out which healthful foods are raised or made locally. Investigate how your area’s geography, soils, or climate affects what farmers grow.
• Start an after school cooking club. Your recipes don’t have to be labor or equipment intensive. Consider pickling garden produce, making salsa or hummus, or creating interesting salads or smoothies. For more inspiration, see Food Education Curriculum Serves Up Sensory Lessons.
• Get parents on board. Send home recipes or a newsletter that also includes nutrition information and activities/assignments that parents and children can do together. Host a “local foods” meal for parents and other community members; have students help prepare it.
• Use children’s fiction and nonfiction books as starting points for exploring foods, farms, and nutrition. See the Michigan Team Nutrition Book List.
• Cultivate young teachers and learners. We learn best when we have to teach something to others. Ask older students to conduct research and plan an interactive lesson for younger students on some aspect of food and nutrition.

1. Choose a featured food or category. Be sure to include items that are in season in your region or locally available. Fruits and vegetables are ideal, but you might also choose a type of local cheese or bread, or a food from another culture (e.g., Middle Eastern dips).
2. Consider seeking donations from local growers, food suppliers, or markets. Find out if any representatives are willing to come into class or host a field trip.
3. Decide how to involve your students. For instance, they might conduct research and create hallway or cafeteria displays complete with cool facts, photos and artwork, nutritional highlights, recipes, and growing information. They could even schedule taste tests for the school community.
4. Decide how to prepare the food. For instance, Will you make and serve it in different ways (e.g., raw apples, applesauce, apple muffins, and carrot-apple salad)? If the celebrity food will be served in the cafeteria, make sure to involve food service staff in planning. Can they use help preparing the food? How will it be served?
5. Allow students to set up taste tests. Ask them to think about what they want to find out and how they will gather feedback (e.g., verbal or written surveys that ask tasters to rate the food’s appearance and taste).
6. Extend the learning. Try to take a trip to a local garden or farm to see the featured food growing. Invite students to uncover its origins and colorful history and folklore. Find out how it is used and regarded in different cultures. Buy, grow, or get donations of different varieties. Try cooking it different ways. Engage parents. Send home recipes or a student-designed newsletter to generate excitement and publicity for the “celebrity.” Students can prepare and serve the food at an open house or parent-teacher night.
   

• Invite a student panel or focus group to give input on potential salad bar items.
• Introduce the idea at a school assembly and bring a “traveling salad bar” into classrooms.
• Have a parent bring a new item into classrooms each week, introduce it, and engage students’ taste buds.
• In the lunchroom, pass out free tastes of items served in new ways (e.g., green beans drizzled with ranch dressing). Follow up with a taste-test survey.
• Feature a suggestion box or area in the cafeteria where students can state preferences for current items or potential new ones.

• Consider challenging a group of enthusiastic students to develop a marketing campaign for the fresh fare. They might conduct cafeteria surveys or create public service announcements, a newsletter, or lunchroom posters.
• Invite art classes to come up with ways to give the salad bar “eye appeal.”

• Post a menu or display case by the salad bar that lists new ingredients and features the local farms that grew or produced them.

• Invite parents to eat in the lunchroom on a salad bar day.
• Routinely send a newsletter home that describes lunchroom changes, highlights the program goals, and features recipes and nutrition information. (In Ojai, CA, the newsletter is named “Nibbles!”)
• Garner interest and support by setting up taste tests for parents and others during open house or parent-teacher conference nights.