Youth Programs Update
While many of our programs have wrapped up for the 2020 season, our youth programs will continue year round. We thought December would be a great time to highlight some of what our youth team has been doing in our Covid adapted programming this year and invite families to join in!
This year has certainly required lots of changes and while we are making plans for in person classes at some point, we continue to be very cautious to keep our students and staff safe. We very much miss working with the youth in person, but have had to lean on our creativity this year to continue to offer opportunities for the youth to connect with the farm and their food.
We have been offering resources all year via video lessons and regular emails of resources from ourselves and other organizations. Much of this can be found on our youth resources webpage, which we definitely recommend checking out! And this fall we started a schedule of virtual class offerings in two formats. We’ve been presenting a lesson every Sunday on Instagram Live, showing off specific parts of the farm, like the hoop house or the paw paw trees, and sharing recipe demos or farming techniques. Check out past lessons here, even if you don’t have kids you can check them out and learn something new!
On Wednesdays, we’ve had virtual class using Zoom and have had a great time showing kids how to roast pumpkin seeds, make mint and honey popsicles, homemade pesto and more! Each week we prepare a recipe together, some weeks using flexible recipes so you can adapt to what you have at home and other weeks we provide home kits with everything needed to make the recipe. It’s been really fun to cook along with the students who have attended and see their creativity in what they make.
Our youth team also maintained the youth garden, both as an educational space to share with students virtually and as an additional production space to grow food for the community. We also expanded to a plot in the neighboring community garden which allowed us to have youth harvest their own salad ingredients for one of the classes.
Coming up this week, we’ll be sharing popcorn grown in the youth garden with students so that we can learn all about it and prepare a healthy snack together in class! If you want to get on the email list for weekly Zoom class, you can sign up here.
We also plan to offer additional home kits for families, whether or not their kids are interested in Zoom class. This past year we were able to distribute more than 200 of both our home garden kits and cooking kits along with 50 pumpkin kits for Halloween with the support of the DC Learn24 Office. As we plan for 2021, please let us know what would be most useful for your family to enhance food and garden learning at home by filling out this form or emailing our Youth Programs Director, emily@commongoodcityfarm.org
