Farewell

Welcome to our final blog post. We have had a lovely time working as a group creating engaging workshops while documenting our experiences. Here’s to our very last post, enjoy!

We would like to share with you our executive summary from our final project report:

It is crucial to develop nutrition and healthy eating skills at an early age for lifelong health. The Community Based Experiential Learning project we completed this year was creating two workshops on food, nutrition and dairy literacy for grade five and six students at Livingstone Elementary School. Food and nutrition literacy is an issue at this school. Our workshops objectives were to develop effective methods of teaching and activities for food literacy, to assess how the different styles of teacher change the engagement of the students, and also to assess how beneficial the workshops were for the students. To answer these questions, qualitative and quantitative questions were asked throughout the workshop. Quantitative questions involved students raising their hands to answer questions assessing nutritional knowledge. Qualitative questions included questions that assessed what they had learned after each workshop, and the highlights of the workshop for each student. Data also included observations from members of our group. After compiling and analyzing the responses Results showed that activities that had hands-on and games components had the highest retention rate, as well as highest satisfaction from the students. Recommendations for future projects included involving parents with a take-home activity, as well as planning games for the end of workshops to keep noise levels down. Objectives for this project were met, assessed and answered.

We all agree that our time together working on food literacy workshops for grade 5 and 6 students at David Livingstone Elementary School was very enjoyable. But like any type of group work, we have certainly had our ups and downs shown here in our “Moments of Significant Change Graph.”

What?

Since LFS 350 is mainly revolved around a group CBEL project, we will be reflecting on a major moment of significance during our project. When we first met as a group, we weren’t sure how the project would turn out since we did not know each other well nor did we know which project we would be working on.  A moment of significant change was when we were first decided how we would execute our CBEL Project: Livingstone Elementary Food Literacy Program – Exploring dairy & dairy alternatives.

So what?

At first, we were quite confused on how we would educate 30 grade 5 and 6 students by using dairy to introduce the concept of food literacy. Our initial project description included teaching about the nutritional benefits of milk and the dairy system.  We struggled with planning workshops solely based on dairy and decided it was best if we created workshops that best suited our capabilities and was the most beneficial for the students while incorporating some aspects of dairy. We were not alone in this decision as it was due to meaningful discussions with our LFS 350 community that led us to this resolution. For us, this was a great moment of significance in LFS 350.  A common theme in Howard Rheingold’s TED Talk is that humans come together to work in groups to achieve a larger goal than what would be possible if done in small groups or individually. He further states that people escape dilemmas “by creating institutions for collective action.” This strongly relates to us because without the guidance and cooperation of our TA and one of our profs, we would not have been able to achieve such successful workshops.

Now what?

As a group, we have discussed the strengths of our workshops and how they could be improved. This is useful for future LFS 350 profs, TAs, and students who will be working on similar projects related to teaching food literacy. Moving forward, we plan on furthering childhood food literacy through future food literacy projects, our individual volunteering and/or work experiences, and collaborations with the community. We have had a great learning experience working with David Livingstone Elementary School and hope future LFS 350 students gain just as much as we have, if not more.

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading about our journey as much as we have enjoyed writing about it. On to the next adventure!

Farewell,

Group 8