LIHU‘E — Nineteen Kaua‘i preschools participated in the pilot Farm to Keiki Preschool Program during the 2011-12 school year, said Tiana Kamen, the Kaua‘i Farm to Keiki Preschool coordinator of Limahuli Garden and Preserve. Kamen and Laura Kawamura of the
LIHU‘E — Nineteen Kaua‘i preschools participated in the pilot Farm to Keiki Preschool Program during the 2011-12 school year, said Tiana Kamen, the Kaua‘i Farm to Keiki Preschool coordinator of Limahuli Garden and Preserve.
Kamen and Laura Kawamura of the University of Hawai‘i College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources Cooperative Extension service spearheaded the program designed to keep the island’s keiki healthy, beginning with preschools and parents, states a news release.
“Both home and school environments play vital roles in developing children’s healthy food preferences and eating habits,” Kamen said in the release. “Many of our children’s taste preferences are developed before age 5.”
Participating preschools in the pilot project were provided with a 52-week Hawaiian Harvest curriculum, which schools used to incorporate gardening and nutrition lessons into the year-long curriculum.
Utilizing school gardens and kitchens as hands-on classrooms, the preschools worked to give children the experience of how to grow, cook and eat a rainbow of fresh fruits and vegetables, Kamen said.
The schools also received various garden-based children’s books funded through the Kaua‘i County Farm Bureau. They will also be receiving a variety of gardening and cooking supplies which were donated by the Healthy Hawai‘i Initiative of the Department of Health.
Participating schools made a commitment to adopting the Farm to Keiki Wellness Policy which ensures their respective school will continue to strive toward making their preschool a center for wellness for years to come, the release states. One of the wellness guidelines includes the preschool informing all staff, parents and caregivers about the wellness policy and encouraging everyone involved to follow it.
“Many schools have exclaimed they have made excellent strides in increasing wellness at their schools because of their initiative to follow this policy,” Kamen said. “They also reported the two most difficult parts of the Wellness Policy was serving fresh and local fruits and vegetables for meals, and encouraging parents to embrace the new healthy policy.”
Kamen said as a continuation of the health education the students get at school, it is vital that parents are educated and engaged in providing healthy foods and activities for their children at home.
Kamen and Kawamura led two hands-on gardening and nutrition parent workshops at the Child and Family Service Lihu‘e Summer Program and at the Pacific Missile Range Facility’s Child Development Center to wrap up the first year of the pilot program.
During the workshops, parents learned about the genetics of food preferences and new techniques to entice their children to tasting new fruits and vegetables, including strategies of role modeling, growing a home garden and cooking together.
Parents attending the workshops donned kitchen aprons and created a lemon, orange and mint flavored water, a carrot and raisin salad, and a homemade ranch dressing to go along with a rainbow of freshly cut vegetables.
They also put on gardening gloves and planted a variety of vegetables including kale, cucumber, lettuce, basil and mint in the new garden at the Child and Family Services Center in Lihu‘e and in the existing garden at the Child Development Center at PMRF.
Kamen noted that several of the parents arrived at the workshop without any knowledge of cooking, or gardening, but left feeling inspired and motivated to start their own home gardens to provide healthier foods for their children and themselves.
Following the first year of the program, the Rotary Club of Hanalei Bay recently offered a donation which will partially fund the program to continue and be made available to all interested preschools on the island.
Kamen, the director of the Kaua‘i Farm to Keiki program, also serves as the Hawai‘i representative on the National Farm to Preschool Subcommittee and will be presenting the Farm to Keiki Preschool Program as a best practice case study at the Sixth National Farm to School Conference in Vermont next month.
The Farm to Keiki Preschool Program, which is currently being evaluated and revised for its second year, is modeled after the Farm to Preschool Program developed by the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute of Occidental College and has been made possible on Kaua‘i, the only island to have had the program this year, by funding and support provided by Hawai‘i Healthy Initiative, Communities Putting Prevention to Work, and Get Fit Kaua‘i.
People interested in establishing a Farm to Keiki Preschool, or contributing to the program, can contact farmtokeiki@gmail.com or visit www.farmtopreschool.org.
