The best description of the newly opened Fleeger Family Educational Kitchen? The Food Network meets Apple TV meets ParishProfile.
Parish Episcopal celebrated the opening of its hands-on, learning kitchen which is designed and sized for pre-kindergarten through 2nd grade use.
Parish students will be combining traditional disciplines with the creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and technology of the ParishProfile preparation.
In opening a re-purposed kitchen as part of the Beasley STEM Center, exciting plans also were announced for an expansive Nauslar Family Garden.
Just steps away from the Fleeger Kitchen, the garden will produce an environmental testing ground for seeds, sunlight and plants which will yield useable fruits and vegetables.
“Everything will be experiential education,” said Myriam Graham, Lower School Dean of Students. “The students will learn by doing. Everything they’ll be doing will be considering; “What will we do? Why are we doing it? and How will we do it?””
The Beasley STEM Center, the Fleeger Kitchen and the Nauslar garden represent more than $1 million of innovative education space which has been added to the Hillcrest Campus in the last year.
The Fleeger Kitchen will be a daily part of the learning experience as well as building an atmosphere of flavorful dishes while developing healthy lifestyle choices at an early age.
Matthew Fleeger said his family was “proud to be part of the solution” of adding wellness-conscious education for Parish students.
Dave Monaco, Allen Meyer Family Head of School, said the transformation of the Beasley STEM Center has created a "powerful teaching and learning complex."
Among the Fleeger Kitchen "appliances", students and teachers will work with an iPad connected directly to a large-sized digital screen to follow any procedures, look up any information and have a real-time visual enhancement of all the activities being conducted. Among the many possibilities of learning through the Fleeger Kitchen are formulating early math applications, exploring states of matter through cooking, tying recipes to historical and geographic topics and, possibly, even creating their own project of making edible, healthy treats to donate to animal shelters.