News

Special Schools Networking Workshop huge success!

We recently held our first networking workshop aimed directly at Kitchen Garden Special Schools, with incredibly valuable outcomes for all concerned.

There are several Australian primary schools with students with special needs currently implementing the Kitchen Garden Program. We often have staff from these schools asking to connect with other schools in the same situation, and also get some advice from us regarding how to adapt the Kitchen Garden Program to their particular circumstances. So, the Special Schools Networking Workshop was born.

A small but enthusiastic group of school staff from six Victorian and Queensland special schools convened for the workshop at Collingwood College, and all were very excited to meet each other and go through some guided discussion together. The schools have enrolled children with at least moderate intellectual and/or physical disabilities.

Speakers Margaret Barrett, Joy Graves, Michael Hunter and Judy Hunter-Dickson each spoke about useful and potential resources, including published cookbooks, creating resources using IT software and resources in use in kitchen classes, all facilitated by our Learning & Support Officer Karyn Duance and our Curriculum Officer Bev Laing.

We started the day introducing ourselves and sharing our highlights and challenges.

Some great initiatives included:

• making the garden beds wheelchair-accessible
• using kitchen benches that can be raised and lowered
• attaching ‘Compix' (image and word) labels to drawers and encouraging students to match a label to an ingredient
• keeping the kitchen visual and attractive, helping bring teachers and classes to it
• holding a show and tell from the garden, and a tasting, at school assembly
• dividing the classes into two for smaller and more manageable groups - half in the kitchen and half in the garden
• adding a water, fire or ‘yuck' factor for fun - worms for lunch!
• using a ‘caring for tools' maintenance session for a rainy day activity
• using chicken incubators to encourage empathy and response
• developing small sensory gardens for students to explore, for example, their sense of touch and smell.

Some challenges included:

• the notion of change, for students and staff as well as parents (which can be a challenge in any school!)
• keeping everyone on task
• using the available space to create productive gardens
• negotiating multiple impaired students and high-functioning students in the same class
• finding more repetitive skills to encourage students with autism (we noted that spending two weeks focusing on the same recipe can help with this).

Some successes included:

• increased communication among the class
• recruiting interested volunteers and making community connections
• hearing reports of the children cooking at home
• using the garden as a place where students can ‘de-stress'

What we learnt:

• the key to success is empowerment - allow the children to take control of their tasks, and simply prompt them where necessary
• the Kitchen Garden Program fits well with the skills and wellbeing goals of students in the middle years
• many schools, with special needs or not, experience common challenges implementing the Kitchen Garden Program, but the benefits to the children are enormous.

We are very grateful to all those who came to this special workshop, for sharing their experiences and inspirations with the group and for giving us many new resource ideas to work on. Thank you to all participants for your attendance, your enthusiasm, your spirit of sharing and your bright ideas.

The whole group agreed it would be wonderful if we could hold this event next year, so we have tentatively scheduled in May 2012 for a Queensland special schools workshop. Please contact Learning & Support Officer Karyn Duance if you are interested in this session: karyn@kitchengardenfoundation.org.au