The Campus Kitchen at Gettysburg College recently jump-started two innovative programs for a community partner with funding from its MLK Semester of Service grant. Below, coordinator Megan Crowe tells how they did it…

The first Virtually Delicious lesson with local youth from The Center/El Centro, an after school program for children in first through eighth grades, took place at the end of February. The program brought together 11 middle-school students and eight student volunteers from Gettysburg College.  Most of the Gettysburg College volunteers were health science majors and used the opportunity to explain nutrition in detail with the middle school students.

The children began their day of combined nutrition and computer education by learning how to best navigate the Internet.  Among the things they learned:  searches need to be as specific as possible in order to yield the results you are looking for.  They took the lesson one step further and embarked on an online scavenger hunt, looking for things like the amount of calories in a slice of cheese pizza and the serving size for one serving of pasta.

After they completed all tasks, the middle school students navigated the MyPyramid for Kids website.  Each student received a blank MyPyramid to color according to the images they found on Google images.  Next, they utilized the “MyPyramid Plan” feature on the website to determine the amounts of each food group they needed.  Each student input his/her age, sex, height, and weight.  Based on the data, the program calculated a personalized pyramid.  The students filled in the pyramids with the recommendations specific to them.

After this activity the kids played the “MyPyramid Blast Off” game.  The game consists of adding food as fuel to a rocket ship until it has enough fuel from each food group.  Once this is achieved, the rocket blasts off to indicate successful completion!

The Virtually Delicious Program is part of continuing community partnership with The Center/El Centro and the Campus Kitchen at Gettysburg College, as well as a piece of CKGC’s MLK Semester of Service. Below, Megan describes a service day completed in lead-up to the Virtually Delicious kick-off.

Students from The Center/El Centro and Gettysburg College assembled on Friday, February 19 to complete a Day of Service at Everblossom Farm. They dug right in, working to maintain the crops in the greenhouse and preparing the ground for additional growing.  It was awesome to see just how many plants were growing in the greenhouse in the winter.  The kids were able to identify and taste several vegetables, including: spinach, peas, spring mix greens, and kale.  Everyone was very surprised at how warm it was in the greenhouse.  Even though it was in the 30s outside, with about a foot of snow on the ground, it was at least 80 degrees inside the greenhouse and everyone kept taking off more clothing as they did more work.

After a successful service project it was time to go home.  The kids were amazed by the cows and we spent the end of our time at the farm watching them and trying to get them to come near us.

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