Healthy Food Access
- Turn your school garden into a donation garden for a local pantry
- Share the Eat Smart website, including healthy recipes, ideas for using foods already in the pantry, tips on how to Plan, Shop, and Eat Smart, and resources for food assistance in your community.
- Farm to School education teaches students about the food system, and how food moves from the farm to our plate.
- Teach students about how food is grown, the steps our food goes through before we eat, where to find local food, and how to reduce food waste using the Exploring Maryland Food program.
- The Edible ABCs curriculum is an early childhood program that introduces children to a wide variety of fruits and vegetables while teaching the alphabet. Many of the foods used in this program are grown in Maryland.
- Read for Health is a curriculum based on storybooks with several lessons focused on local food, food systems, and gardening.
- ReFresh is a curriculum for grades 4 and 5 with monthly lessons, including lessons on seasonality and Maryland Food.
- Veggie Voyagers is a gardening for nutrition curriculum for grades K-2 that introduces students to how edible plants grow and encourages trying a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables.
- Edible Garden Lab is a garden-based nutrition curriculum for grades 3-5 that is intended to be used for growing edible plants throughout the school year, using both indoor and outdoor growing methods.
- Homegrown School Lunch Week is a week-long celebration of local food that is sponsored by the Maryland Department of Agriculture and the Maryland State Department of Education. This event typically takes place in late September or early October. School systems are encouraged to offer locally-sourced food on the school menu during that week and engage students in education about local agriculture, including planting school gardens, meeting local farmers, and trying local foods.
- Ask your cafeteria manager or principal if your school is participating in this event, and find out which local foods are being offered that week. Promote those foods to your class.
- Encourage families to visit a local farmers’ market with their children and use this Farmer’s Market Scavenger Hunt to select something new to try at home.
- Invite a local farmer to visit your classroom to share what it is like to be a farmer, what they grow on the farm, and how the products they grow are used.
- Teach lessons from the curricula highlighted above and offer tastings of local, in-season foods whenever possible.
- These Local Food Fact Sheets can be used when discussing locally grown foods and when they are offered in the cafeteria.
