We were thrilled to be able to harvest and donate over 300 pounds of collard greens to DC Central Kitchen yesterday. DCCK is an excellent neighbor, and their staff has been extremely supportive of our school farm efforts. More than that, their hugely successful efforts to “use food as a tool to strengthen bodies, empower minds, and build communities” syncs perfectly with the goals of not just the farm but our entire school community.
Walker Jones Education Campus is a Responsive Classroom learning environment. RC is an approach to education that seeks to meet the social, emotional, and academic needs of the child in order to achieve the optimum education for all we serve. These are the guiding principles of the Responsive Classroom approach:
– The social curriculum is as important as the academic curriculum.
– How children learn is as important as what they learn: Process and content go hand in hand.
– The greatest cognitive growth occurs through social interaction.
– To be successful academically and socially, children need a set of social skills: cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, and self-control.
– Knowing the children we teach-individually, culturally, and developmentally-is as important as knowing the content we teach.
– Knowing the families of the children we teach and working with them as partners is essential to children’s education.
– How the adults at school work together is as important as their individual competence: Lasting change begins with the adult community.
So growing and donating food to the community in which we live is not only an exercise of social responsibility but a key component to a richer education for the great kids of Walker Jones. When we teach children to care, we are teaching them not only how to be good citizens but also the self-management skills necessary to become successful in whatever place in life their hopes and dreams might take them.
