Eating  A  Rainbow  Challenge

Dear Parents,

Vanderlyn has received a special grant entitled Project Learning Gardens. This educational grant provides schools with strategies for building effective and long-lasting garden-based learning programs. Teachers are provided with hands-on training, curriculum aligned to national standards, lesson kits filled with supplies, a schoolyard garden, fully-equipped garden cooking cart, and strategies for summer garden maintenance.

Gardens provide a context for multidisciplinary learning, ranging from nutrition and science to social, studies, math and language arts. Students will benefit by expanding their palates, taste-testing healthy foods, and learning about food origins; engaging in authentic science field investigations, manipulating the environment to understand math in real-life applications, recreating historical activities, and writing across all disciplines.

To kick off our Project Learning Gardens initiative, Coach Dwyer has been teaching your boys and girls about nutrition and how to follow the “Choose My Plate” food guide created by the Center for Disease Control (CDC).  According to the CDC, half of our plate should be made up of fruits and vegetables.  With this in mind, it is necessary for all of us to understand that each color of fruits and vegetables naturally contain essential vitamins, minerals and nutrients our bodies need to experience optimal health.  "Making a Rainbow" is a great visual way to teach kids how to eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and a message that we'll be promoting throughout this school year. Our students have been very excited about eating a “rainbow” of colors to help nurture healthy eating habits. In order to encourage healthy eating and kick off this great initiative, we will hold a fun school-wide Rainbow Challenge.  The students will have the chance to win extra recess time, a rock climbing party or a fitness class!

“Eating the Rainbow Challenge” highlights colors rather than a specific food. The program is designed to speak to the students in a language that they understand: tickets, points and colors! What’s not to like? Watching each other eating fruits and vegetables popularizes the idea, and it creates a shift in the way students view eating healthier foods.

Each day of the week will highlight a specific color of fruit or vegetable.  The students will be encouraged to bring that color for snack or lunch on that day.  Remember, it must be an actual fruit or vegetable to qualify as a point for the class. 

The Rainbow Challenge will begin on Monday, September 24, 2018. 

In addition to the fruit and vegetable color, we are asking students to wear clothing articles to match the color of the day (see below for details).  On Friday, each grade level is asked to wear a certain color of the rainbow so we can take a school wide picture of our students and staff victory over the “Eating a Rainbow Challenge.”