With passports in hand and aprons decorated with their own logos, children at Parkside Commons in Syracuse are ready to learn about Chinese culture.  

Monday marked their first lesson: the difference between Chinese and American schools, complete with a Tai Chi lesson. Today they will learn about calligraphy and the Chinese language, as well as make trainer chopsticks, among other things. And on Thursday they will make eggrolls and steamed vegetables using a bamboo steamer.

‘They’ve decorated their aprons, and they’ve made their logos,’ said Bobby Gillen, assistant director of the Mary Ann Shaw Center of Public and Community Service. ‘They’re thrilled and excited.’  

These lessons are part of the ‘Books and Cooks!’ program, which is currently in its pilot semester. It serves to improve literacy and teach healthy eating habits.

Although CPCS runs both literacy and nutrition programs, ‘Books and Cooks!’ is the first that combines literacy, nutrition and culture. It is also unique because it focuses on students 7 to 10 years old, rather than middle school students, said Victoria Li, a junior nutrition major and the nutrition coordinator of the program.

Parkside Commons, a Section 8 apartment complex, is an area where families live below the poverty level, said Ann Wendt, director of the Catholic Charities’ after-school program at Parkside Commons.

‘It seemed like a good place to go,’ Gillen said. ‘It’s certainly a community and area of the city that is in need.’

Most of the children come from one-parent families who are paid minimum wage and want to go back to school, Wendt said. Most of the parents did not graduate from high school, making it hard for them to find a job, she said.

‘(The children) are so excited because they get the attention here that they don’t get at home,’ she said.

After attending the Clinton Global Initiative Conference for two years straight, three tutors from the Syracuse University Literacy Corps decided they would submit the ‘Books and Cooks!’ idea to the conference.

‘The third time we said, ‘All right, we’re going to do something a little bigger and more challenging for us,” said Tim Biba, a senior public relations and political science major and a coordinator of the ‘Books and Cooks!’ program.

The goal was to create a project more meaningful to the community, he said.

His partners at the time, Greg Klotz and Kate Callahan, both 2010 SU alumni, worked together to create the program with the help of CPCS.

‘There’s a lot of need,’ Biba said, ‘and so we decided we’re going to focus on our traditional aspect of literacy but also work on nutritional eating habits.’

Biba and his partners directed ‘Books and Cooks!’ toward Parkside Commons. Commitments to Action is an initiative that focuses on diverse issues, including education, alleviating poverty, global health, and global and climate change, according to CGI’s website.

A few weeks after submitting the team’s Commitment to Action plan to the Clinton Foundation, Biba received a phone call asking for more information about the project.

‘I thought that was interesting because in the past two years when we submitted things, they said, ‘Congratulations, you were accepted, come to the conference,” Biba said.

This year, Dean Lorraine Branham of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Dean Melvin Stith of the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, and Chancellor Nancy Cantor sponsored the students to go to the conference to represent the university, he said.

The group had been given the Outstanding Commitment to Action award for identifying local needs and using local solutions at the conference, he said.

‘Books and Cooks!’ was recognized by both the Clinton Foundation and the Walmart Foundation, which directed a $3,000 grant toward the program.

The team now consists of Biba, Li and Allison Stuckless, a junior policy studies and Spanish major who has been a tutor at Parkside Commons for three years. The trio has the assistance of CPCS, which will provide tutors and transportation, Gillen said.

The team has a year to garner tangible results with ‘Books and Cooks!’ and plans to submit additional goals for the next GIC, he said. Among these goals is a potential exercise component.

Wendt said 30 children currently take part in the Catholic Charities’ after-school program at Parkside Commons. Of those 30, 12 are taking part in the ‘Books and Cooks!’ program, Stuckless said.

‘I think a lot of the children that attend the program are not on the grade level they should be,’ Wendt said. ‘The reading and math levels are really low.’

To improve the children’s literacy, Stuckless said she creates a lesson plan about cultural differences between the country studied and the United States. Each child has his or her own journal — a passport that is laminated with a photo of its respective holder. They use their passports to write what they’ve learned and what they want to learn about, Stuckless said.

The children will read books that are related to the culture and split into research groups to learn about food, geography, leisure and art, Stuckless said.

In addition to literacy, the program will also have a nutrition component, for which Li creates the lesson plans.

‘Nutrition is one of those things that is the foundation of everything else that you do in your school day when you’re a kid,’ he said.

The nutrition component of ‘Books and Cooks!’ is meant to teach the children healthy eating habits and basic skills, such as how to handle a kitchen knife, how to read the food pyramid and how to understand nutrition labels, Biba said.

Each cooking session will start with a lesson about the meal of the day, its importance and new cooking techniques, Li said. With the help of volunteers, the kids will cook the meals and everyone will sit and eat together.

To decide what to focus lesson plans on, a pretest was given to the children to see where they stand on nutritional knowledge. The pretest found that the children have trouble differentiating between fruits and vegetables. Their favorite foods consist of cupcakes, candy, chips and soda.

‘Our goal is to expose them to fresh, healthy, natural foods,’ Li said. 

To determine if the children have made improvements, a post-test identical to the pretest will be given to them at the end of the semester, Li said.

Wendt said most of the older kids take care of their younger brothers and sisters, and she hopes they will apply what they learned when they make healthy snacks.

The program also has potential long-term benefits for the children. Parents are more likely to focus on immediate needs, such as paying the rent, keeping the heat on and buying food, instead of guiding their children’s study habits, Biba said.

‘They might lose someone else reinforcing the importance of education as a means to move beyond the current immediate problems,’ he said.

Stuckless said the kids idolize college students, so tutors are able to build great relationships with them. Working with the tutors gives the kids the positive role model they need, she said.

Said Stuckless: ‘Because we relate to them, they know they can go to college and they can be successful.’

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Published on November 16, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Contact Laurence: [email protected] | @lgleveille