It’s Not Easy Being Green…or Is it?

By Roxanne Clarkson, Corey Elementary, Arlington ISD

We were very fortunate in that our Art teacher had already scheduled a Family Art Night for our Corey students and parents.  Our thoughts were what better way to support her AND get kids on board with our smoothie ideas than have a taste test!  This way we weren’t in charge of the entire event and we could focus all of our energies on the smoothies; and at the same time, sign more students up for Fuel Up to Play 60 while their parents were there to help out.  This worked our VERY well!  The kids didn’t bombard us because they had other stations to go to as well.  

My teaching assistant, Debbie Bean, came up with the recipes.  The idea was to see if we could change student’s minds about green and to see how they would react.  We made two green smoothies for the taste test, one a little sweeter than the other.  She used fresh organic baby kale, spinach, celery, stevia, orange juice, and ice for the first one.  The same ingredients were used in the other eliminating the stevia and adding an organic frozen fruit medley of mango, papaya, strawberry, and pineapple.

Most of them had a very favorable reaction, as a matter of fact we had a former student with his siblings come and not leave!  He wanted to drink the whole pitcher!  His said, “I don’t get good stuff like this at home.”  The students decided that green wasn’t such a bad color for a drink after all.  Even though we had great results, I think it could have been better if we would have had better visibility.  We were in a small room without much advertising.

If you ever get the chance to Piggy Back onto someone else’s event, take advantage as you will have great results!