Thursday 11th June

It has been a while since our last blog but never fear, there are things to report.  Miss Williams and Mrs Messenger have recently been to visit a fruit farm to develop a link with our school and we should soon be ready to make visits in the Autumn term.

On another note our school grounds day is on Friday 19th June and we are hoping to plant some of the vegetables we have been growing in school together with some flowers to make the school look pretty.  If you have time come and give us a helping hand!

Friday 15^th May 2009

Welcome to our “blog”.  We are a small group of staff and pupils from our school who are involved in developing a healthy lifestyle and understanding about what we eat and where it comes from.  Our main aim is to work with the Food for Life Partnership to transform School and Community food culture across England .

First of all we should introduce ourselves.

Lucinda Kirby – Food for Life Partnership Co-ordinator

Mr. Anthony Dwyer – School Co-ordinator (Headteacher)

Mrs. Audrey Parish – Chair of Governors

Mrs. Elizabeth Gibbons – Non-teaching staff Governor (mid-day supervisor)

Mrs. Susan Shilton – Cooking Champion (School Cook)

Mrs. Margaret Messenger – Growing Champion (teacher)

Miss Alison Williams – Farm Champion (teacher)

Mrs. Jo Jones – Website Champion (teacher)

Miss Izzy Sloan – Year Two School Councillor

Master Ethan Hawkins – Year Two School Councillor

Master Todd Bell – Year One School Councillor

Miss Sonya Veneziani-Rocha

– Year Reception School Councillor

Master Max Braber – Year Reception School Councillor

So far we have been developing our school kitchen and shop and have had the school kitchen extended to help deliver and clear away our meals efficiently.  Soon we will have replaced our current system of using food trays at lunch time and will be using proper plates and dishes like we do at home.  Prue Leith (a famous cook) is coming to open our new kitchen, this should be exciting! 

Mrs Shilton is going to attend a School Council meeting next half-term so that we can discuss designing a new menu board to display.  Our Cooking Champion is also arranging to deliver some cooking clubs to us, firstly in the holiday club during the Summer then hopefully to many more of us!

Just to add to the excitement we are having a visit from a cooking bus in October and you might even get an invitation to cook with us!  We can’t wait.

We have been able to acquire gardening equipment through taking part in the Morrison’s Voucher Scheme.  The School Council did a survey in each class to discover what things we needed to buy to help all the children access our growing program.  These resources included trowels, forks, gloves, wellington boots, spades, cold frames, potato barrels and much much more.  We have already began to grow our own potatoes in the barrels and have one for each year group.  They are growing very fast and we can’t wait to pull them out!

Our cold frames have arrived and we have plans to put them together before half-term and begin to grow some vegetables from seeds.  Year One children will begin their gardening afternoons on Fridays and the Year One School Councillors from each class will report back to the School Council so that we can help to keep our blog up to date and check progress.

As Farm Champion Miss Williams has been working hard to arrange a link with a local farm so that we can see where our meat or milk comes from.

Mrs Messenger as the Growing Champion arranged a training event for our staff to learn how to garden organically with Kay Whitfield from Garden Organic.  The teachers really enjoyed it, taking part in a quiz and then getting their hands dirty in the compost.  They learned which plants or herbs would be best to grow in pots and which in raised planting beds.  They made seed pots from newspaper wrapped around a small yoghurt drinks bottle, then removed the bottle and filled the paper pot with compost and planted a seed in each.  Some of these seeds can then be transferred straight in to the ground in the paper pot (believe it or not!).  Why don’t you try it too?