Starting With Soil

Whole Kids Foundation is on a mission to improve children’s nutrition by inspiring, educating, and empowering kids to make better food choices. That’s why we embrace Organic Education - to help kids understand where their food comes from and to share with families how organic values are connected to the food they eat.

Starting with Soil is a pad-based educational experience that makes essential connections between our food and the natural world. Created in partnership with the Center for Ecoliteracy and designed for families with children 6-12 years old, Starting with Soil brings to life the riveting, reciprocal relationships at work in topsoil, and shows how these relationships are vital to support healthy food and a healthy environment.

The first three chapters demonstrate how nature creates soil and how long this process takes, the importance of pollinators, and the critical roles animals, the weather, microorganisms and cover crops play in organic farming. The final chapter presents ways families can explore organic education at home, in school, in the community or while they shop.

Young users can plant seeds, build a compost pile, drag a microscope over organisms in soil to get a better look, and view the symbiosis at work when corn, beans and squash are planted together, as Native Americans have done for centuries. Animation and well-placed sound effects tie the content together.

Children come away with a sense that soil is not simply dirt under their feet – it is alive, dynamic and vital! Teachers will appreciate Starting with Soil as high quality supplemental content that kids can easily use on their own. Starting with Soil is also a helpful addition to learning that takes place in school gardens and other outdoor education settings.