Winning the 2012 SA Public Teaching Award for Excellent School Support Staff was quite overwhelming. I love my job and love being able to provide additional learning activities for the students at my school, it has been a truly humbling experience to have so many people acknowledge and congratulate me for the work that I do and for winning this wonderful award. As I am only able to do the work that I do because of the supportive staff at my school, I decided quite early on that there was no better way to spend my scholarship than by involving them in this wonderful opportunity to extend not only my Professional Development but theirs as well.
Our school was in the process of setting up a Kitchen Garden program when I won this award so I spent the last term of last year doing a range of T&D around this. I was able to take my Principal on a Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Tour which resulted in our school applying to become a Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden School ourselves. We were extremely pleased to have had this application successfully processed early this year and we are looking forward to the training days scheduled for later this year for both the Kitchen and Garden lessons.
I was also able to attend a number of training days at the Food Forest which helped me further my knowledge of vegetable growing and fruit tree care. This new understanding was incredibly useful as I began my knew role as Garden Specialist at our school. I worked with staff and students to design, build and plant out our garden beds and orchard. We used National Tree Day to plant our orchard and this enabled us to include our parents, local member of Parliament Tony Piccolo and local Greening Group in this fabulous activity making it a real community event.
Another of the courses I did at the Food Forest was an Introduction to Permaculture which was thought provoking and inspiring and has lead to my enrolment in a Certificate in Permaculture Design which will take place at the Food Forest later this month. I plan to incorporate many of these design principals into the schools garden area as it grows. I did look into the Forest Schools training but decided that whilst this is a wonderful program and that students would benefit from structured outdoor learning opportunities, implementing the Kitchen Garden at our school was our main focus and finding ways of implementing this with Environmentally Friendly and Sustainable practises would be of most benefit to staff and students now and into the future.
To help get our Kitchen classes up and running I was able to bring Sprout (Callum Hann from Master Chef and his partner Themis Chryssidis a nutritionist) to our school to run a cooking and nutrition class for all of our staff, the session was fantastic, they cooked a variety of dishes for us and talked to us about good nutrition focusing on child friendly options that we will implement in our Kitchen classes, staff were also shown a range of cooking techniques and tips, I took the opportunity to show Callum and Themis our Kitchen space – they were impressed with our plans and provided invaluable advise in regard to the layout of the kitchen spaces and items that we should purchase as a start up kit for each space.
