Local Food Literacy in Ontario Schools: FREE Webinars in 2016/17
Posted: November 8, 2016
Categories: Edible Education Network / Good Food Ideas for Kids / GoodFoodBites / News from Sustain Ontario
Do you want to provide more local food education at your school? Check out recordings from our 2016/17 Local Food Literacy in Schools webinars to help your students gain a greater awareness and knowledge of local food; better understand its availability; and learn local food skills.
Pack
ed with hands-on tips and resources from local food educators, these webinars have provided:
- Ideas for how to get students excited about local food
- Curriculum connections for various grade levels and subject areas (including math, science, social studies, and health & physical education)
- Sample lesson plans and activities
- Answers to common questions
- Where to access more high-quality, ready to use resources
These webinars have been hosted by Sustain Ontario’s Edible Education Network in partnership with Ecosource, FoodShare, and Roots to Harvest (with thanks to the Greenbelt Fund).
Webinar #1: Teaching Local Food Literacy: This webinar provided tangible lessons for how to bring local food literacy education into your classroom. View the Webinar recording and access the slides online.
Webinar #2: Eating for Local Food Literacy: This webinar focused on how to use school meals (including cafeteria lunches, hospitality classes, and your school’s Student Nutrition Program / breakfast program) to enable local food literacy education. This webinar also included case studies of schools in Ontario that are using more local foods in their menus as well as meal programs that are involving local food education in their mandate. View the Webinar recording and access the slides online.
Webinar #3: Cooking Up Local Food Literacy: This webinar focused on how to teach local food literacy while engaging your students in preparing food in various school settings. It included information about how and where to access local food. View the Webinar recording and access the slides online.
Webinar #4: Growing Local Food Literacy: This webinar focused on how to teach local food literacy using your school garden. View the Webinar recording and access the slides online.
Webinar # 5: Embracing Local Food Literacy: Shifting your School Food Culture: This webinar focused on how schools can shift their school culture to better enable students to adopt a love of good, healthy and local food. It included many aspects of the school food environment to consider including gaining whole-community buy-in, ensuring that school food offerings and local food literacy efforts align, and exploring alternative fundraising models. View the Webinar recording and access the slides online.
About our project partners:
Ecosource is an Ontario-based community environmental organization that inspires personal action and responsibility through creative programming for youth and communities. Ecosource has been leading projects pairing local food procurement with food literacy in Ontario schools since 2006.
FoodShare is a non-profit organization that works with communities and schools to deliver healthy food and food education. We believe everyone deserves access to affordable high-quality fresh food. Since 1985, FoodShare has pioneered innovative programs like the Good Food Box, impacted what kids eat in school, and improved the way people eat and grow food across Toronto every day.
Roots to Harvest 
is a not for profit and charitable organization in Thunder Bay that uses food and farming to engage, educate and employ high school aged youth. At the school level, Roots to Harvest works with schools and school boards in order to foster positive school food culture developments both with students and decision makers.
Sustain Ontario’s Edible Education Network brings together groups in Ontario that are connecting children and youth with healthy food systems. The network seeks to better enable these groups to share resources, ideas, and experience, work together on advocacy, and facilitate efforts across the province to get children and youth eating, growing, cooking, celebrating, and learning about healthy, local and sustainably produced food.
The Greenbelt Fund changes the way we eat food in Ontario. Our innovative investments get more local food onto the plates of Ontarians. We work with businesses, institutions and NGOs to make Ontario’s farmers the first choice for consumers. The Fund’s work has generated a 13-fold return on our investments, permanently changed the food value chain, and improved local food awareness and education across the province. As a not-for-profit, the Greenbelt Fund is supported by public and private sources.