38-The Power of Ask With Melissa Litherland

<p>Melissa's education includes a B.S. in Zoology and a M.S. in Biological Sciences (Neuroscience) from Eastern Illinois University. She loves how FCS naturally encompasses a lot of interests (food, baking, child development, science, learning, agriculture, basic life skills) and allows her to teach and prepare a future generation for the game called LIFE!</p><p><strong>SHOWNOTES:</strong></p><p> •   I'm in the district with just one, I'm the only family consumer sciences teacher. And it's a small district. Fall River High School has a middle school, high school and elementary. So we have, I think high school class sizes are about 40 total, also 120 high school students, so pretty small. My class sizes are about anywhere from eight to… I try to cap them at 16, just because we have four kitchens. With that, I have got a great administration that supports family consumer sciences, and they gave me a chance, I came in as a long-term sub and last year, so I was at eight weeks in before the state shut down and we had to go virtual, so I was literally learning on the fly. (2:22)</p><p>•  That was a blessing with the covid break, is that we were able to actually be home, we didn't have kids that had activities to go to, so we could plant and harvest and we whenever we wanted to, and that was a big blessing to be able to do that. But yeah, we have a 20 acre farm out in the middle of South Eastern Wisconsin, about an hour from Madison, hour from Milwaukee, and it's a great little community to raise our children and nice to have the quiet with it. (4:31)</p><p>• I'm really interested in and bringing into all the culinary classes and teaching is the farm to table movement. The farm kids don't know where their food comes from. They think it comes from the store. And so that's what I've been really trying to just implement. I learned you can grow vegetables from kitchen scraps, that was one of my covid tips I learned. And so we currently, we have have carrots, turnips and lettuce growing in our classroom right now. (7:45)</p>