Cooking up an education
Encinal School incorporates food prep in curriculum
MENLO PARK — Eating nutritious meals is essential for young minds that are in the process of learning. Eating while learning might be even better.
A Menlo Park kindergarten classroom since March has been doubling as a mobile kitchen pumping out fresh meals for kids and their parents. That’s thanks to Charlie Cart, described as a mobile kitchen classroom that connects lessons in math, science, social studies and language arts with cooking and food preparation.
Charlie Cart was founded in 2014 by Carolyn Federman, who previously worked on Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard Project in Berkeley.
The cart is housed in Maria Teresa Magana’s kindergarten Spanish immersion classroom at Encinal School, but it eventually will be shared with any teachers at the K-5 school who want to use it. Magana won the right to test out the cart because the Menlo Park City School District teacher facilitated a recent $11,000 grant from Junior League of Palo AltoMid Peninsula that made it possible to purchase the cart. Principal Sharon Burns said Encinal is the first public school to acquire the cart.
Encinal for years has had a garden funded by the parent teacher organization which the students have helped to plant and harvest, but it was never incorporated into the learning model till now, Magana said. She said a third-grade teacher is planning to use the cart to harvest and cook potatoes and a fourth-grade team wants to use it for an upcoming school auction. The PTO is offering $50 to any classroom that wants to use the cart to buy additional items not in the garden.
“We have a wonderful garden here and I always saw an opportunity to tie it into programming,” Magana said. “I can have every child write the steps (in Spanish). ... My first lesson was on St. Patrick’s Day. We made green salad with pears, Granny Smiths and grapes. The kids cut everything up. ... They prepare it and they get into it.”
Marijane Leonard, a Menlo Park parent and PTO member whose son Ty is in Magana’s classroom, said she’s excited for the opportunity. She also has a 9-yearold daughter at Encinal who started Spanish immersion in kindergarten.
“It’s another setting where he can have a rich oral language experience that is different from the academic setting,” Leonard said. “Anything else we can have that’s hands-on is a bonus.”
She said it’s important that her kids learn Spanish, because it will give them more opportunities when they are older.
“It helps with executive functioning, switching back and forth between two languages,” Leonard said. “They don’t think about it. They think it’s normal to learn two languages.”
Kirsten Reeder concurred. She has a child in Magana’s class and a thirdgrader who also began learning Spanish in kindergarten.
“It’s important for them to learn about different cultures and the different languages and when we do experience Spanish-only speaking people, they can speak to them in a meaningful way,” Reeder said.
An added benefit is she might begin to involve her kindergartner in cooking at home, citing her daughter Kaia’s excitement at learning how to make alphabet soup in Spanish recently in class. Reeder said Kaia and her friends made up a song about the recipe.
“I haven’t involved her when I make soup because it’s easier and faster to do it myself,” Reeder said.
Burns said by next school year, the cart will be completely immersed in the school’s curriculum. She’s excited that the cart can be wheeled out to the garden or possibly taken off campus for such things as demonstrations. She also said the cart could possibly be shared with other district schools.