E.I.McCulley Jaguars! test

Students at E.I.McCulley love to partake in a variety of different activities! This love of participation and engagement, helped the dedicated teachers at E.I.McCulley start a great new club! The teachers offered the club “You’re the Chef” (YTC) This was a super opportunity for the students to take on responsibilities and learn new roles in the kitchen. Some students stated that they indeed enjoyed the club immensely and definitely loved helping around the kitchen even more at their own homes. Their favourite recipe was Rice vermicelli with greens. We will be passing this information along to the DSBN Summer Heat program, where students can work on their cooking skills.

Here at E.I.McCulley school, we are so privileged to have tremendous students who adore our nature community so much. Grade 2 students in Mrs.Winstanley’s class got the golden opportunity to help EMS (Niagara Emergency Medical Services) and their community gardens plant some fruit and vegetables for both our school garden, along with EMS’s community garden. This news was received by cheers and thrills of excitement by the enthusiastic grade 2’s. Mrs. Winstanley was contacted by the EMS, which was the start of such an amazing project! This was a perfect opportunity for our students, because it is an essential part of the grade 2 healthy eating curriculum, and along with that, children are provided with more healthy options. Now, it’s more likely they will start to enjoy healthy food more, which is our goal. The students have started some projects in their class, but this doesn’t satisfy their need to plant more and help their community continuously!

As a grade 8 student at E.I.McCulley, it is my goal to be as much involved in the school as possible. Looking around the school, I became interested in the Kindergarten Favourites and Likes survey that Nurse Lorraine conducted earlier this year. I know my peers aren’t particularly interested in vegetables, which led me surveying my class! The results were the least expected! 100% of my class, that was present that day, participated in the survey and they all seemed very invested in this topic. This survey also started deep discussions, like their reasoning for healthy food choices they made, etc. In my class, there were 13 favourites and 67 likes! After conducting the survey, I decided to present this data in a new, innovative way. I decided I would step out of my comfort zone and try something new! This keen interest caused me to explore google spreadsheets, something I’ve never used before. I would say, I’m overjoyed that I tried out this platform! I found this platform very simple, convenient, and most importantly, fun to use! Not only has this survey made me realize how important vegetables are, but also introduced me to a very beneficial platform which I will definitely use in the future!

At first, we chatted with our educational assistant, Mrs. Neuman, our librarian Mrs. Upton, and the grade ⅔ homeroom teacher Mrs. Winstanley about our wonderful, inclusive Student Nutrition Program. We found out that Niagara Nutrition Partners assist our breakfast club with funding and guidelines. We decided to get some personal accounts and inputs of volunteers and students who attend the program, and all of their inputs were very positive! Some key facts they stated were, “It feels like home”, “I can always depend on the breakfast club!” and so on. To make sure our breakfast club was the best, we took a look at the “Tips for Student Nutrition Programs”. There we learned many things that we already had included in our breakfast club! Lastly, to make the program more entertaining, we planned to invite our school health nurse Ms. Lorraine! All the participants, including Ms. Lorraine, were very pleased with the time they spent together at the breakfast table. While having fun, they also built relationships, a key to being successful at E.I.McCulley!

On February 21, 2018, Mrs. Upton, a proud teacher at E.I.McCulley, requested Nurse Lorraine, an exceptional health nurse at the school of E.I.McCulley to come and educate students on the vital topic of healthy eating and hand washing. Nurse Lorraine started off with discussing with kindergarteners, the importance of hand washing, which led them thinking into other healthy habits. The intriguing question that was asked was “How can you encourage your friends and family to eat more vegetables?”. A variety of insightful answers were given from the students, including the idea of sharing vegetables with their friends and family, which demonstrates role modelling healthy eating. Thus, we decided to use their ideas and promote eating more vegetables at E.I.McCulley’s Family Fun Night. With the help of Nurse Lorraine and Mrs. Mann Wybrow, the winner of the Metro food grant, this excellent idea was a huge success! Since this brilliant idea was accomplished, we decided to perform the same survey in my grade 8 class. The results were impressive! We hope to give this another chance to promote eating healthy even more, and hopefully, we will use this data in our upcoming Fun Day at E.I.McCulley! Stay tuned to watch the exponential growth of the Jaguar community!