Parkside Agricultural Program in the Press!
Milwaukee Parkside’s very own Agricultural Program was featured recently in the Bay View Compass. Great job to Ms. Payne’s amazing 1st graders!
Awesome Sauce!
1st and 2nd grade have been preparing something amazing – pasta sauce made with tomatoes from our very own Multicultural Gardens! Students began by learning the life cycle of the tomato plant (science), moved on to investigate their own food traditions (social studies), taste tested the sauce as inspiration for a list of adjectives to describe to in turn, create labels for the sauce (ELA) and also assist with the recipe (math). The final product is something to be proud of. Great job, 1st and 2nd grade, with the Parkside Premium Pasta Sauce! Stay tuned, families and friends for more details.
Middle School Korean Cooking Day
Fifth through eight grade enjoyed a Korean cooking day with dishes ranging from rice bowls to kimchi. The 6th and 7th graders learned about Confucianism, their own food traditions and wrote a letter to Chef Saehee sharing their most treasured food tradition memories.
The 5th graders kicked off a fractions unit by making kimbap with Chef Adam. Kimbap is a Korean style sushi. Students were tasked with taking the recipe (which included fractions) and expanding it for a large party. They also took a look at how many rolls of kimbap were created and how to divide them up to ensure everyone got a taste! Stay tuned for delicious pies coming your way via this same fractions unit and our fabulous fifth graders.
This is one of many examples of the excellent project-based cross-curricular opportunities offered through the agricultural program.
Fantastic Food Trucks!
Parkside students and teacher extraordinaire Ms. Zitzke are pictured below with our panel of chef judges. Students put together food truck proposals with the guideline of using produce we’ve grown as a school in the menu. Their presentations were amazing, creative and ethnically diverse. Thank you Joe Sutyak and Dan Nowak for volunteering your time for this special project. Thank you Ms. Zitzke for a brilliant project.
Ps. That’s Jennifer Bartolotta, too!
Fall Harvest Meal Magic
Parkside partnered with Bay View High School to create a Fall Harvest Meal worth remembering. Parkside 6th and 7th graders applied to be a part of the overall project: planning, prepping, cooking, designing, plating and serving. For 2 weeks, students traveled in small groups to the high school to be paired with a high school mentor for the overall experience. The high school culinary arts instructor, Ms. Sims used food we harvested from our gardens for this meal: swiss chard, collard greens and butternut squash.
Thank you to our forty guests who attended the meal itself. We are so pleased to have Bay View High School as a partner and we really enjoyed this experience. Our students left each session with huge smiles on their faces, sharing how kind, thoughtful and friendly their high school mentor was.
Check out our interns with Mayor Tom Barrett!
Winter at the Hoop Houses
What grows in the hoop houses all winter long??? Lots of things do! We are currently growing all sorts of leafy greens that will be used for the Bay View High School Thanksgiving Feast, parent culinary classes and weekly student classes in the aquaponics lab. Temperatures remain close to 20 degrees warmer inside the structures so that leafy greens can grow far into the winter months!
We also saved quite a bit of our bounty by freezing, drying and preserving what was grown. All of this is used for projects throughout the winter months! We recently made a delicious soup with green tomatoes we had frozen. This will be featured at an upcoming community event, The SouthSide Soup.
Butterfly Learning Labs
Our butterfly learning labs filled in nicely this summer. A huge thank you to Stephanie Calloway for her assistance weeding and maintaining the sites. Our A-Team enjoyed studying these beds last week. Students each selected a section to sketch and later prepared a report for their class about what they observed. During the summer months, lots of butterflies and caterpillars were seen. Every year, these gardens will bloom just a little bit more, providing a sanctuary for pollinators. Every 1 in 3 or 4 bites of food is thanks to bees. This is just another way that Parkside is looking out for our school, community, city and preparing our students to be excellent stewards of society.
What amazing growth!
Students and families continue to enjoy the bounty we produced this summer at the hoop houses. The quantity of produce harvested far exceeded expectations. Thank you to those families who shopped our farm stand at the back to school picnic and drive in movie night. We look to 2019 with plans for a summer market stand offered weekly.
Summer at the Hoop Houses
What happened all summer at the Parkside Hoop Houses? Alot!! Teachers, students and parents volunteered to help keep things watered, weeded and harvested. All of that bounty could not have been maintained without the dedicated support of our families. Thank you for your hard work and attention to the care of the plants the students started. We look forward to continuing to grow together!
Bay View High School and Parkside, A Promising Partnership
Ms. Herrera’s 2nd grade students partnered with Bay View High School 11th and 12th graders for a morning of fun at the Parkside Hoop Houses.
The teams completed an array of activities together. Most impressive was how the Burmese and Spanish speaking high school students sought out the Parkside ELL students so that they could support each other. What a great way to show community, friendship and kindness.
Students completed a hoop house math activity; calculating the area of the site and brainstormed the best vegetables to plant. They monitored the temperature inside vs. outside and made their own greenhouse together (in a bottle). The pairs planted tomatoes and basil for our multicultural plans. And the teams also completed a mud painting activity; beautiful!
Complete our survey to ensure 100% inclusion in the planning of our Multicultural Gardens!
Our Parkside student body represents 90% of Milwaukee zip codes. We will honor this amazing demographic by planting to celebrate cultural diversity at the Parkside Hoop Houses (hoop houses are a temporary green house structure and we have 2 of them for student enrichment thanks to grants and partnerships).
Room 24 is studying Milwaukee neighborhoods and will kick off the garden plans (i.e. Brady Street: Italian gardens), etc. They also have investigated their own food traditions and have brainstormed to put together this short survey to ensure inclusion for all of our students and families. Room 16 worked together as a group to define food traditions for you. The following all contribute to a food tradition: a favorite food or recipe, eating together at home or at a restaurant, celebrating and decorating to enjoy a time together and being with those you love. A collaborative mural with Bay View High School and Room 23 will advertise this thematic project with our neighborhood and community.
Please take a moment to answer the survey questions. We greatly appreciate your feedback!
A Commitment to Compost and Community Care!
Thank you to our 7th grade Compost Club for training students to begin our compost diversion program THIS WEEK! Compost Crusaders dropped off our bins and we are ready to get started. Ask your students about composting and maybe they can help you learn how to divert organic matter at home, too! Every little bit helps and ensures we improve our school, community, city and the environment! For more information about composting in the City of Milwaukee, contact Compost Crusaders.
This initiative is funded by our key drive so don’t forget to bring in your old keys for recycling.
A new cohort and lots of fun!
Last night, we launched session 2 of our culinary arts parent cohort. It was a great night! We are excited to partner with PF Chang’s and Chef Adam Kuske to bring these rich experiences to our parents and students. Through fundraising efforts, donations and a myriad of grants, the growing power and options we can offer our families continues to bloom. As we look towards spring and planting in our hoop houses, the plan is to honor the rich diversity that Parkside represents with a multicultural garden. Watch for a school wide survey (to come) about your own family’s food traditions. A special thank you to Bay View High School for their support on many collaborative projects that enhance this program through arts integration and peer mentoring. 
Culinary Arts Continues
We concluded our pilot 4 week series last night. We have four more sessions planned through May. These exciting classes offer parents and their students the opportunity to create something delicious AND nutritious together. Thank you to Chef Adam for his hard work and our families for their support of our Agricultural Program at Parkside!
7th Graders Lead the Way
A team of very dedicated Parkside 7th graders is trying to make our world a better place. The team has been working for the last two months on a compost diversion project. They have met with a high school student mentor, researched composting, put together a presentation to train the school and created beautiful posters to guide student compost diversion. The team presented their research to 5th through 8th grade to train the students for a compost diversion launch in the month of March.
A huge shout out and special thanks to Ella Williams, Lucy Peters, Kayla Arnold, Egypt Isom, Kylie Moore and Janassi Arce-Jones for giving up their lunch period once a week to put this program together.
Through tracking they have found that we hauled out over 300 bags of garbage in the month of February (the shortest month of the year). That is an average of 20 bags per day! Even if we were able to reduce that by one bag of organic matter monthly – we could reduce our overall landfill contribution by 10%! Together, Parkside can improve the school, community, city and environment through their compost diversion program.
Please remember to donate keys you no longer use for our key drive – these are being recycled and the cash the school receives in return will fund the pickup fee for the compost weekly.
Every little bit helps!
Culinary arts is the coolest – week two was just wonderful!
Yet another tasty recipe, yet another nutrient dense dish, yet another opportunity for students to eat their vegetables – including kale, sweet potatoes and delicious shiitake mushrooms. Special thanks to Chef Adam for his expertise in providing a delicious and nutritious meal!
Things are heating up again in the kitchen with culinary arts experiences!
The agricultural program at Milwaukee Parkside School for the Arts offers students nutrition lessons coupled with hands-on arts integrated projects and a parent cohort of culinary arts classes through the aquaponics lab, raised bed gardens and hoop houses.
This program was formed with the help of input from community listening sessions hosted last summer in partnership with the Medical College of Wisconsin. Parkside is growing fresh produce year round through the already existing aquaponics lab, raised beds and now the hoop houses. The hoop houses were made available to the school through the listening sessions and community awareness. They have been renovated through student effort, a parent task force and support from Bay View High School service learning pupils. The hoop houses are surrounded by an orchard that will add apples, pears and cherries to the mix for specialty classes later in 2018.
All produce is used for nutrition education, tastings, a parent cooking class that brings the fresh food and ways to cook it home to the children for well-rounded support, donations to local food pantries (partnerships already established) and a workforce development opportunity for our partner high schools through a summer farmer’s market booth.
Key in this program is the parent cohort. Working with a local chef, parents are invited to school for free cooking classes where they use ingredients fresh from the gardens to cook seasonal recipes with their children working alongside them.
After a successful pilot offering of this culinary arts series last fall, with 75 participants and a wait list for future classes, Parkside has launched our spring 2018 series. Students and families work together to create a culinary masterpiece every Tuesday night from 6:00-7:30 p.m. using fresh produce from the Aquaponics lab, raised bed gardens and soon the hoop houses.
Parkside represents 90% of Milwaukee zip codes. This very special demographic presents an amazing opportunity for community collaboration and cultural celebration within the program. As such, the hoop house location has been designated a ‘multicultural garden’ honoring all of our students. The planting and maintenance will be completed by Parkside students studying things like Milwaukee neighborhoods through social studies investigations, along with Bay View High School environmental science and biology students mentoring the elementary classrooms for service learning opportunities and hands on life science applications. This partnership supplies a firm foundation for both the creative and functional aspects of the project overall.
Milwaukee Parkside Agricultural Program: Honoring the Past, United in the Present and Committed to the Future!
Through a USDA grant, 3rd & 4th grades study nutrition:
During the month of January, all 3rd and 4th grade students at Parkside attended a nutrition education series in the Aquaponics lab. Each class included a recipe to taste! Lessons focused on our five food groups, well balanced meals, planning meals we love (that are also healthy), sharing our favorite recipes with others through creative writing and also how physical fitness complements a well balanced diet to set us up for success! Proceeds from this grant benefit the agricultural program through the procurement of arts supplies, paper supplies, kitchen equipment, seasonings and MORE for the Aquaponics lab!
Bay View High School and Milwaukee Parkside a Promising Partnership!
Milwaukee Parkside 1st grade students collaborate with Bay View High School geometry students to create barn quilt panels for the Parkside Multicultural Gardens located at 6th and Norwich! Stay tuned for more amazing collaborations.
Healthy Lunch Lowdown!
An Overview of What is Planned
Agricultural Programming in the News!
Urban Beets Art Gallery and Root Vegetable Project
New for 2017-2018: Nutrition Education
Nutrition Education
During the 2017-2018 school year, through a partnership with the Medical College of WI, students will be offered an array of agricultural learning experiences:
- Growing food in the raised beds, hoop houses and aquaponics lab.
- Visiting Bay View High School for insight into the culinary arts.
- Touring restaurants to observe farm to table cooking.
- In class nutrition support by the Agricultural Program Coordinator.
- School wide fresh food tasting from our very own harvest (every student will be exposed to up to 5 lbs. of fresh produce through this exciting program).
The Aquaponics and Agriculture Program at Parkside is well underway. In less than a month, all grade levels have signed up for projects in the lab. Check out what has been already accomplished!
Parent Cohort
Working cohesively with the nutrition education program for the students at Milwaukee Parkside, parents will be invited to participate in culinary arts classes so that they may bring the influence of cooking nutrient dense, seasonal foods into the home.
Providing a unified approach to wellness and health sets up all students for success.
Invitations for these sessions will be sent out classroom by classroom as the program is introduced during the 2017-2018 school year.
School Wide Nutrition Pledge
In conjunction with our dedication to nutrition and our students, Milwaukee Parkside pledges to be a healthy and nutritious school.
Incentives will move from treats and candy to non-food rewards (i.e. stickers, prizes, extra recess, games, etc.).
Supporting the ‘whole child’ ensures success for all. Please let us know if you need assistance with supporting this philosophy at home.
There is plenty more coming before the end of the school year, what follows is a summary of projects both underway and upcoming!
K4
Life Cycle of the Butterfly-Mr. Tyler
Worms! – Ms. Denice
K5
Friendship Salad – Ms. Clark
1st
Lunar cycles – Ms. Sayrs
2nd
Turtles and Tortoises – Ms. Herrera
Urban Beets – Ms. Glueckert
3rd
Fish Tank Mural – Ms. Hopkins
5th
Machines and How they Work – Ms. Stempniewski
6th
Water cycle – Mr. Kellogg/Ms. Feider
Gardening Math – Ms. Gipp
7th
Hands on Classes at BVHS – Ms. Galonski and Mr. Adam
8th
Korean Cooking Class – Ms. Porter and Mr. Veternick