At Geeveston Primary School, we are actively involved in the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Program. This program aims to provide positive and memorable food experiences to school children by teaching them how to grow, harvest, prepare and share fresh, seasonal food.
The program is run in a variety of school settings across Australia. It is designed to be fully integrated into the school curriculum as it offers possibilities to reinforce literacy, numeracy, science, cultural studies and all aspects of environmental sustainability.
Our kitchen garden provides many ingredients for our cooking and food creations. The students are involved in caring for the garden with planned, supervised lessons every week. Planting, weeding and watering the gardens is part of the responsibility shared by the students. Learning about seasonal growth and observing changes in the garden, provide our students with practical, lifelong knowledge of the environment. In addition to growing the food, the students are assigned the task of harvesting and preparing what they grow. Our teaching kitchen at Geeveston Primary School allows for weekly cooking classes in which the students prepare fresh meals using produce from the garden. We then share our meals with each other and the staff.