Club Management

The Original Farm to Table Startup

August 2, 2019 / Comments Off on The Original Farm to Table Startup

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….and the steps to make your own happen.

I arrived on my campus in time for their first year of being a Leader in Me campus.  It’s a program that takes Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and strives to instill this motivational mindset in kids.  One of the big overarching themes of Leader in Me schools is that they turn over and create a lot of leadership roles for students.   Teacher sponsored clubs, before or after school is one of the carriers to bring kids through the 7 principles.   

Now hold on, If you’re a teacher I know you caught the part where I said teacher sponsored clubs, before or after school.  Before I taught at this school I may have quite honestly let out an exhausted sigh before even starting in with one!  However, kudos to my campus for keeping the nature of this so simple and honestly, not overwhelming.   

It is not a requirement for teachers to do this, but my campus rocks! Soooo many teachers came up with ideas: Kindness club, BARK club (for animal care), Running club, Karaoke club, Comic club (drawing), a Baking and Vlogging club, Dance club, Choir, Drama, Student Lighthouse (with a hospitality and Administration assistant mindset),  etc.  Some teachers did this solo with a student body size they were comfortable with, and some partnered up and took a few more applicants.  As teachers we picked our meeting times, focus, and applicants.  Again, we had no pressure to start a club, many of us just did! 

I opted to start a small club called Farm to Table in January so I could use the spring semester as a trial run before the next school year.  I needed time to begin experimenting with what worked and didn’t work in regards to size, age, time, and activity types.  I also wanted to sharpen exactly what I wanted the focus to be for this small group of students. 

Our school happened to have some preexisting gardens in need of some TLC.  In our subtropical, humid, Southeast Texas climate, weeds grow abundantly faster than produce.  I wanted to create a group that did more than just weed a garden bed because I was concerned that I’d struggle with student retention.  My husband thought I should create a cooking club, so between my interest in the garden project, and his inspiration to cook with the kids, I started down this path to merge easy kid friendly food prep ideas with our garden.  In hindsight this merge should have been SO obvious.    

In a previous school life of mine I had started and ran a school garden but just sent the goods home with kids as it was picked.  Food prep wasn’t a consideration.  Honestly, this new perspective has been what has made working in a school garden something fresh for me, AND this is sort of an outlet.  It’s a place to work with the kids in a fun, relaxed way, apart from all the same management of a classroom and lesson objective pressures.  In my heart of hearts I do believe showing up here in the garden is still bringing other meaningful lessons and awareness to my students, lessons I won’t always recognize. 

How’d I do it? The Details to Start:

  1. Pre-plan the size and age level you want to work with.  For me, I chose to keep it small since I was a solo sponsor: 13 students that are in 3rd – 5th grade.  With any amount of food prep I wanted a small group for this controlled chaos.  Plus I really wanted to see this group take on a close family feel.
  2. Think through your meeting times: I chose Monday and Wednesday a.m. every week 7:30-7:50, mostly for watering and exploring the garden.  This is in line with early morning tutorial times on our campus and not on my own tutorial mornings. I kept attendance for my own records but was aware some kids have bus schedules and breakfast to take care of so I didn’t expect 100% attendance. I also chose every other Thursday afternoon immediately following dismissal for about 45 minutes.  This was our time to work with food.  I did not have produce from our garden starting fresh out with the club so I chose recipes and fresh produce from the store to get us going.  Side note, on average, the other clubs met once every other week.   My decision to pick up the additional mornings was relatively easy to keep up.  Weeding during this spring semester fell on additional days though I may revise this in the coming year.
  3. Create a student application and pickup/turn in location.
  4. Build Student Awareness. Submit morning announcement messages to get students interested and add in application location info. 
  5. Filter through the applicants. The first year was easy for me, I had exactly 13 applicants in January and they all had teacher recommendations or approvals for their character!   I also only had one applicant with a food allergy so I gave the parent a quick call to discuss what we would be doing in the club, the severity of the student’s allergy, and confirmation of the families comfort level with the club.
  6. Hold your first meeting! I’ll share some start up ideas on another blog.

I’ll continue to share ideas and summaries from our meet ups in my blog and you can see what’s currently happening in my journal link, as well as on instagram @farmtotableteacher. Reach out to me here or on my Instagram to ask me questions or request more specific content!