Hello Beautiful!

It looks like you're new to The Community. If you'd like to get involved, click one of these buttons!

In this Discussion

This is awesome!!!!

AVLAVL Raw Newbie

I teach grade 2 and I highly promote healthy eating in my classroom. For lunch I always eat in the classroom with my students so they can always see what I am eating. I always bring massive containers of fruit for lunch and my students are amazed at the amount of fruit that I eat. They always come and show me their fruit and some even ask me if I brought my "collection of apples" to school today :)

Well, today I had a student (a tiny little 7 year old) bring a very big conainter of fruit salad for her lunch!!! She was so proud of it and showed my how she had eaten all of it. Her mother told me that she was vegetarian and wanted me to give her more ideas as to what she can give her daughter for lunch. I told her that I ate a raw vegan diet and that most of my meals are fruit & vegetable-based.

I just thought that this was just awesome!!!!

Comments

  • eechoeecho Raw Newbie

    Thats great, you are a good teacher in many ways!

  • joannabananajoannabanana Raw Newbie

    ahh that's so great audrey!! i bet it feels good to make an impact on a little kid's eating since they usually don't eat very well.

  • AVLAVL Raw Newbie

    I love to see my "kids" eat well. They were always asking me tons of questions at the beginning of the year about what I ate, like "why do you eat so many apples?", "Do you ever eat anything else but fruit?", "Do you have a collection of bananas and apples today?"

    Now they are just used to seeing me eat large fruit salads. Their questions have changed to:

    "Do you have melon or grapes today?" "Oh, look I have strawberries just like you!", "Can I have some of your lunch?", "Do you like pineapple? That's what I have for snack today!"

    Oh boy, do I ever hate pizza & subway lunches. On top of that, we have a popcorn sale every Thursday (butter, cheddar & caramel flavors). The good thing is we are going to start to sell fruit smoothies every week. A smoothie company is going to make them for us and sell them to the students. They are going to be dairy-free too!

    I taught my students how to make freshly squeezed orange juice (only 3 out of 19 had ever had real orange juice). I brought in my citrus press and a whole bunch of oranges (and some grapefruit) and we all made orange juice and drank it. They LOVED it, they kept asking me for more. So I had to go get a big bag of oranges the next day to make more :)

    A month ago we had a fruit & veggie competition at school to see what class could eat the most fruit & vegetables in a 2 week period. I loved that challenge (unfortunately teachers could not participate...or else I would have kicked everyone's butt!)

    Oh, and by the way, I never reward my students will sugary snacks. They earn points on a "credit card" and then they can "buy" a prize in the prize box (dollar store stuff).

    Our entire school promotes daily exercise, so every teachers takes their class for a 20 minute walk first thing in the morning. We walk around the neighborhood, some little trails in a conservation area behind the school and I even found a little forested area across the street (7 of my students had NEVER walked in a forest!!! What the heck do they do on weekend?)

    Thanks everyone for the nice comments :)

  • that is awesome!!! i love that!!

    i always send my son(grade 3) to school with many containers of fruits and veggies. ( i wish we could send nuts too :( ) he often even shares them with other kids in his class who are yearning for watermelon and mangoes and berries and sweet peas and peaches and whatever. all my friends are surprised by the large amount of food he goes to school with and how empty it comes back. regardless if he is sharing or not, it's always empty. he loves picking out his fruits for the week, really disslikes grocery shopping...any shopping , but loves the part where he gets to pick out his food.

    i think that's wonderful that you sit in class and eat with them. what a great example. most of my sons teachers are big on handing out sugary treats all the time for good beahavior..it hink the message kinda gets lost. especially in between hot dog days and pizza days. there isn't even a vegetarian option let alone a vegan one.

    in comparison to how small the health unit is, it makes me really sad, all the contrary information that goes on daily inside the school dispite what is learned in the classroom.

    this post made me so happy!! you are a great teacher :D

  • Oh man. That is incredible.

  • sv3sv3 Raw Newbie

    It's great you're having such a positive effect on those kids.

    The muck they serve in schools makes my blood boil. Over here in the UK, the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver set out to try and change things but I'm not surehow much difference it's actually made. :-(

  • RCBAliveRCBAlive Raw Newbie

    We need more teachers like you! When my daughter was in elementary school, her teacher gave candy to each child who finished their milk. What's wrong with this picture? It was so frustrating! Thanks for making a difference in the lives of your students who could potentially impact on others . . . and so on and so on and so on.

  • AVLAVL Raw Newbie

    RCBAlive - candy after drinking milk? Seriously? That's horrible, I can't believe your daughter's teacher used to do that!

    I think that my students will learn a lot from seeing what I eat. There's a little boy who always bring that fluorescent blue Kool-Aid crap to drink. When he asks me if he can get his "juice", I always tell him, that it's not juice, it's poison. So now he asks me if he can go get his "poison" to drink!

  • AVL, ok, the poison comment is hilarious... i'm sure his parent's LOVE that... lol... funny

  • susan121susan121 Raw Newbie

    This made me smile! :)

  • swayzeswayze Raw Newbie

    And people say it's too hard to feed kids fruits and veggies. Baloney, I say! :D

    I actually had an exam last Thursday night and right before we started, the professor passed around bags of candy for us to take from to help us focus. *sigh* You definitely get the Teacher of the Year award, AVL!

    Swayze

    www.fitonraw.com/blog

  • That is SO awesome of you AVL!! Teachers can be so influential on us, even if subtly, until we can look back a bit later.

    And despite your school still not "getting it" completely with the promotions of the "bad" stuff, it's really wonderful how it actively promotes exercise and real fruit (and dairy-free) smoothies! Baby steps, but steps none-the-less!

  • Raw PassionRaw Passion Raw Newbie

    We always got rewarded with sweets at school and I very rarely remember ever being encouraged to have fruit and veg at school.

    If we had a hot meal we had to ask the dinner ladies permission to eat dessert - it was based on if we had eaten all our cold mushed over cooked carrots or not.

    What you are doing reminds me of my uncle, he works at a school and to get the kids into fruit they play this game where they are blind folded and get to try exotic fruit and they have a chart to see which is leading.

    He was amazed most kids hadnt even tried grapes - by the way, if your interested honeydew melons are winning currently, but Papaya was a big hit.

    You remind me of him because his teaching methods are much better than the standard ones, if all teachers were like you Id have no reservations about sending children to school.

  • That is SO awesome! Way to spread the love around! :)

Sign In or Register to comment.