Module 20: Taste Testing and Celebrating the Garden Harvest

Module Overview

The best part of growing foods in a school garden for many students is the chance to harvest the foods and taste them. The harvesting and preparation of vegetables and herbs is a time for celebration! It also opens a lot of opportunities for incorporating activities that address content area learning standards. 

Katie Young, Farm to School Program Coordinator for Columbus City Schools in Ohio contributed resources from CCS for this module.

After this module, learners will be able to: 

• Explain why taste testing is important
• List ways to celebrate the school garden harvest

Roadmap

These items will all appear, in order, in the module.

• READ: Taste Testing
• READ: Plan a Party
• ADDITIONAL RESOURCE: Sample Timeline for Coordinating a School-wide Taste Test
• ADDITIONAL RESOURCE: Home Grown Taste Test Guide
• ADDITIONAL RESOURCE: Conducting Taste-Testing Activities in Schools: A Guide for Teachers and Administrators
• ADDITIONAL RESOURCE: Taste Test Guide from New York’s Rural Health Network

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Taste Testing

Developing Food Preferences

Exposing children to nutritious foods they have not seen or tasted before helps them to develop preferences that support healthy diets for years to come. Taste tests are fun and engaging activities that help students explore new foods using all five senses.

Students may not like every food you give them on the first try. Give them a chance to try foods again and again, even if they don’t like them at first. Children may need to try some foods 10 or more times before they like them. The good news is that studies show students are more likely to try foods that they helped to grow!

Team up With Your School’s Food Service

Coordinate with food service to serve GTS foods in different ways around harvest time. Ask them to promote the food items in school communications and through social media. If possible, prepare samples of the foods in the same way they will be served on the school lunch line. 

Taste Testing Approaches 

Action for Healthy Kids provides ideas and recommends for hosting a taste test at school:

Cafeteria Coaching

Enlist middle school and high school students along with school nutrition staff and cafeteria staff to encourage kids to try new foods and eat nutritious school meals. This toolkit from Iowa State University will guide users to set up cafeteria coaching programs at local schools: Cafeteria Coaching Toolkit.

Please click NEXT at the bottom of this page to advance through the module. To return to the list of modules, PC users click “Modules” in the top left corner, App users click the back arrow in the top left header.

Plan a Party!

You have planted, watered, and tracked the growth of your crops, and now it is time to celebrate your successful harvest with your students. 

Don’t think of this as extra work at the busiest time of the year, but try to incorporate some of these activities into what you already have to teach. If the kids are excited about the final party then they will be more engaged in all of the activities leading up to event. Explain that the party will be an opportunity for them to share what they have learned with the guests.  

Planning for the Celebration

Make this an end of the year project that can incorporate many content area standards. Encourage students to take the lead.  

Curriculum Integration

Writing

Students can:

• Generate a guest list for the party.
• Design a formal party invitation.
• Make a “How to Grow a Garden” guide.  Procedural Writing.
• Write a short report on the vegetables that the class grew in the garden.  Lower grades can draw and write simple descriptions of vegetables.  Higher grades could write an opinion piece about the benefits of school gardens or healthy eating.
• Write an acrostic poem using garden words.
• Write thank you letters to anyone who has supported the school garden program.  
• Write recipes using items from garden.

Science

• Make a life cycle of a plant sequence (add in any pictures that you took along the way).
• Have students make diagrams of the plants and label the parts.  
• Have a group teach about the importance of good soil in a garden.
• Teach about the basic needs of plants.

Social Studies

You can teach some of your history,  geography and human systems standards by:

• Learn about where each of the vegetables originally came from and how they came to America.  
• Locate the continent where the plant originated and track the journey to America.  
• The Human Systems Standards focuses on the community and human effects on the environment, both positive and negative.

Art 

• Create vegetable prints
• Add speech bubbles to pollinator portraits explaining how they helped the garden grow.
• Team up with the Art teacher to plan a project to decorate the party space.
• Design garden signs to post near the covered raised beds.

Math

• Use info from seed packets to compare the height or growth time of the plants. Kids can cut string to represent the height of each type of plant and then put them in order of smallest to largest.  
• Have students make a map of the garden and write math stories to go along with what they have planted. 
• Use rulers to track the growth of the plants in your garden.
• Review area and perimeter using the low tunnel garden.
• Use different measurements while following a recipe.

Serving Foods from the Garden

Plan to serve food from the garden. If there is not a large enough quantity, purchase the same food that is being harvested at school from a local farmer or retail store. Prepare the foods that were used for the taste tests.

Make garden-themed decorations.

Invite Families, Friends, and Leaders!

Invite other classrooms, school administrators and other staff, school board leaders, school volunteers, and most importantly, the students’ families! 

Check out this slideshow of Harvest Celebration images!

Please click NEXT at the bottom of this page to advance through the module. To return to the list of modules, PC users click “Modules” in the top left corner, App users click the back arrow in the top left header.