Contact: Janice Peterson

During the 2003-04 school year, MPFS students were introduced to a revised cross-discipline nutrition curriculum entitled "Dimensions of Wholeness". Knitting together themes of personal well-being and global resource concerns across Health, Science, Humanities, Physical Education, Guidance and Quakerism coursework, the new program also included several service projects to underscore learning taking place in the classroom: UNICEF collections, canned-food drives, fund raising for Water for Watsala (see below), creating hygiene kits for homeless shelters, infant care kits for hospitals in Iraq, and baking items for a local shelter.

The curriculu was well received by students. Notable were positive modifications in some students' eating habits and their application of principles learned when considering the difficult problem of inadequate supplies of food and clean water throughout the world. Worthy of explicit reference was an exercise which apportioned sixty 3rd-8th grade students to represent the relative populations of continents around the world. They were then given a number of M-n-M's (a highly desirable, if not particularly nutritious commodity!) equivalent to the relative food supply available to their continent's population. "Experiencing" the disparity in food distribution around the world in this way brought home profoundly the relative good fortune of U.S. citizens and need for attention to this serious inequity.

The program's global awareness component was explored in greatest depth by our most senior students. We coupled the use of pottery wheels in Art class with a servicelearning project centered around students' investigation of world nutrition concerns. 7th and 8th grade students learned about the factors which contribute to resource inequity and identified regions around the world whose food and water supplies are insufficient. Concurrently, they created wheel-thrown rice bowls to be sold to the school community to raise funds for nutrition projects. Having raised over $500, the students then critically examined the work of various relief agencies to which they might donate their funds, considering program sustainability, administrative overhead, "reach", relative impact, etc, and presented their findings to classmates and faculty. As a community, they chose by consensus to donate their rice bowl proceeds to Water for Watsala, a project bringing potable water to poor regions in Nicaragua.