Celebrating 10 years at Southmoor Primary School

Ten years ago funding from the Victorian Government’s Go For Your Life! initiative helped an initial 25 schools across the state implement a Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Program. To celebrate this exciting 10-year-anniversary, we will be telling the stories of some of these schools. The first article in the series shines the spotlight on Southmoor Primary School.

Year 6 students at Southmoor Primary School are using the skills they have learnt in their Kitchen Garden Program to mentor the school’s Year 3 and 4 students.

The school, in the Melbourne suburb of Moorabbin, is celebrating 10 years of running the Kitchen Garden Program, after joining during the Victorian Government Go For Your Life! initiative in 2007.

Principal Marie Kick, who has been at the school for 20 years, said they run the Program for students in Years 3–6, with 90-minute kitchen classes and 45-minute garden classes each week.

Marie said growing enrolments had put pressure on the scheduling of classes, as the school’s numbers had grown from 260 to more than 430 in recent years. But Southmoor wanted to come up with a solution to keep the Program running the same way it has been for the past 10 years, given it is so valued in the school community.

She said last year the Year 6 students virtually ran the kitchen themselves, so the school thought this year they would ask them to assist the Kitchen Teacher, Selena Francis, in running the classes for the Year 3 and 4 students.

“It worked both ways. It helped us with session planning and allowed the Year 6s to use the skills they’d learnt,” Marie said.

Marie said the Year 6 students would have the opportunity to harvest, prepare and share with the Year 3 and 4 students, as the younger students develop the important life and social skills that are intrinsic to pleasurable food education.

“I can’t speak highly enough of the Kitchen Garden Program, it’s a wonderful program,” she said.

Marie, a former board member of the Kitchen Garden Foundation, said building up the Kitchen Garden Program had been a steady process over the past 10 years.

“A lot of people come to visit our school and say ‘We could never do this at our school’, but it’s been a gradual process for us. We do one project a year,” she said.

After receiving the ‘Go For Your Life!’ funding back in 2007, the school community banded together to transform an old, disused toilet block into a kitchen space, to complement their already established kitchen garden.

She said getting the whole school community, including teachers and parents, behind the Kitchen Garden Program had been one of the keys to its success.

“It was the most impressive community involvement I’ve seen in my time in education,” Marie said.

Each year the school continues to develop the garden, and projects have included creating a garden classroom from a teepee!

Marie said students came up with the idea for the teepee while studying an inquiry unit on dwellings.

“The children wanted to build an alternate structure and came up with a house on stilts, which was a bit hard to do, so then they came up with a teepee,” she said.

The school has also incorporated art learning into the Kitchen Garden Program, by creating garden art and working with the Artists in Schools program to create a mural of a tree.

Marie said they also ran a ‘Leaving their mark program’ with Year 6 students, allowing students in their final year of primary school to work on a project with a local artist or builder to enhance the school.

She said a recent project saw Year 6 students create a vertical garden for growing herbs.

Just like their garden, Southmoor Primary School’s Kitchen Garden Program continues to flourish and grow.

Scroll through the gallery of images above to see the development of Southmoor Primary’s Kitchen Garden Program.

• To find out how your school or centre can dig into pleasurable food education head to our Kitchen Garden Classroom membership page.
• If you are in Victoria, check out the Victorian Pleasurable Food Education Package, which is supported by the Victorian Department of Education and includes a bundle of discounted professional development, educational resources, membership and support.

Any questions? Call our friendly Support Team on 13000 SAKGF (13000 72543).