At Brighter Bites, we love seeing students get excited about green beans, kiwis, and other fresh fruits and vegetables. It lets us know we are successfully creating communities of health through fresh food! If you’ve never been to a Brighter Bites distribution in person to experience how fun produce can be, we invite you to read through a few letters that Brighter Bites received from students in our Austin and NYC programs. They’re guaranteed to brighten your day!
Connecting new foods to fun experiences is a great way to encourage children to try unfamiliar foods, especially when it comes to produce items that children often shy away from.
Brighter Bites teachers are taking the fun food experience to heart and putting it into action with their Brighter Bites produce. Ms. Gaby Garcia, a Kinder Bilingual Teacher at Betty Best Elementary School in Houston, TX thought up a fun experience for her students that incorporated her Brighter Bites produce, riddles, a magic box, and sentence stems. Take a peek!
Ms. Garcia’s Produce Circle Map Game
#1. Ms. Garcia puts the fruits and vegetables in a “magic box”, and before pulling them out one by one, she tells her students a riddle to help them guess the item.
#2. After 7 seconds of thinking time, students “pair and share” with a partner before raising their hand and sharing their answer with the class using the sentence stem “I think it’s a ___”.
#3. After hearing a few answers, Ms. Garcia pulls out the item to a drumroll and students confirm their predictions.
#4. Next, students share ways in which they use the items at home.
#5. Ms. Garcia prepares some of the items for students to taste, like cucumber with lemon, peach, carrot, green onions and lime (a fun one to observe!).
#6. Students each choose one of the food items to draw and put it on a circle map for display in the Kinder hallway.
Ms. Garcia additionally brought out homemade sweet potato fries to share with her students the day after the activity. What a success!
“This was such a fun activity for us all,” said Ms. Garcia. “Students were engaged and totally fascinated by the riddles. I was happy to find that most students knew every item in the bag and could share a way they used the item at home. The best part of it all was being able to share the delicious and nutritious food items as we sat in a circle and talked about them.”
Way to go Ms. Garcia for crafting such a fun food experience!
This summer in Austin was a HOT one! We stopped counting after 20 days of triple-digit temperatures and heat indexes that suggested we could fry an egg on the sidewalk!. But heat doesn’t stop the Brighter Bites Austin team. We bagged and distributed 57,272 pounds of fresh fruits and veggies to an average of 300 participants per week at five different summer programs, including El Buen Samaritano, Linder Elementary, Mainspring Schools, and the two summer camps run by the Andy Roddick Foundation.
To reinforce the value of the fresh produce, staff members taught CATCH Nutrition Education lessons and contributed to weekly cooking demonstrations. These lessons included an interactive cooking demo as well as discussions about nutrition and health. As an added bonus, Program Associate Eliza Weeks presented the participants at El Buen Samaritano with a demonstration of how to prepare leafy greens like kale and beets in a variety of easy and delicious recipes, including cool smoothies and salads perfect for summer snacks and meals.
Kindergarteners from Pecan Springs Elementary enjoy a Brighter Bites cooking and nutrition education lesson making Banana Ice Cream at the Andy Roddick Foundation’s Summer Learning program.
Program Associate Christina JeanBaptiste leading a CATCH lesson with a Kindergarten class at Mainspring School.
As warm spices and cool breezes fill the air, 3rd graders at Lorenzo De Zavala Elementary in Dallas have celebrated the harvest season by conducting a pumpkin research project. Ms. Hita, who teaches 3rd graders, wrote the following assignment: “With the Brighter Bites program you have been learning about the fruits and vegetables we receive on a weekly basis. For this reason, we have selected for you to research pumpkins.” Students had three weeks to investigate pumpkin history, scientific properties, and culinary — as well as decorate their own pumpkins.
On presentation day pumpkins of all varieties adorned the school’s hallways: from classic jack-o-lanterns to Pokémon pumpkins and from Super Ninja Turtles to bedazzled beauties. Students were excited to share what they learned about pumpkins, describing how Native Americans used pumpkin seeds for medicinal purposes, revealing that the largest pumpkin weighed over 2,000 pounds, and explaining that pumpkins are technically fruits thanks to their seeds. Of course, students were eager to discuss their favorite pumpkin treats – pumpkin pie, roasted pumpkin seeds, and of course, Brighter Bites’ Pumpkin Spice and Everything Nice Smoothie.
First grade students at Norman Elementary in Austin have an exceptional teacher in Marta Galan. A former physical education teacher from Spain, Ms. Galan understands that if the kids “don’t have a healthy style of life, they cannot study. They cannot do anything.” This is the best and most important thing, Ms. Galan says. “There are many students who have never tried an apple or something like that and they did for the first time this fall. I love this program.”
Ms. Galan uses some of the produce she receives for science experiments in class. The photos below came from a week when she and the kids received celery in their Brighter Bites bags.
This week, Molly, Mike, and I taught CATCH lessons to the 1st graders at Lantrip Elementary School in Houston. We each taught two classes about the CATCH concepts of “GO” and “WHOA.” We discussed the importance of being healthy by eating GO foods and doing GO activities – the ones that a parent, coach, or pediatrician would green light or say “yes” to, instead of “not now” or “no.” The kids’ responses and feedback during the lessons created a fun and energetic atmosphere. Their eyes lit up when we talked about the fruits and vegetables they enjoy like strawberries, apples, broccoli, and carrots.
They drew colorful pictures of healthy foods when we asked them to represent their favorite fruits and vegetables. I noticed their excitement when they spoke about activities like swimming, jumping, running in the park, and playing organized sports. The first graders at Lantrip have learned the concept of making healthy choices. The CATCH curriculum has helped light a spark within the students there and we at Brighter Bites hope to keep it going with the fruit and vegetables we give them in their bags each week.