After months of tweaking the recipe, students at Salt Springs Elementary School offered a taste test of their spice blends Saturday afternoon. “I think it is great,” says Grade 6 student and co-CEO, Owen McGray. Thinking of ways to engage students in a collaborative project, teacher Jennifer MacMillan had a late-night epiphany about the spice project. After a meeting with the school principal the next day, the project was a go. “We all blended it together, we created the spices together, we packaged, we put stickers on, we did all the things. We weighed the blends,” she says. In addition to the student-wide effort with the product, they also created a promotional video. “The students, to share their ideas, they came up with the storyline, they wrote the script. We had a producer, an editor and all those things. So we got to show everybody what their best at and they got to bring that to life,” teacher, Kristin Dean says. The fundraiser is for the school’s playground. One most students involved won’t get to use on a regular basis. “My sister and a bunch of other kids are going to get to experience the future of our school and I’m going to come back every now and then to see what’s going on,” McGray says. “We’re probably not going to be here since the grade sixes, it’s their last year, but we get to set a legacy and make a new playground for the younger kids,” adds fellow student, Peyton MacDonald, who also designed the logo for the spices. Jennifer MacMillan says that kind of selflessness is one of the indirect lessons the students are learning from this project. “We’ve seen an insane amount of collaboration and communication between the students. We’ve done a lot of project-based learning where we hands-on experiencing the different types of making and doing and things like that. It’s been all of their ideas from the beginning.” The students created five different spice blends. Taco Blend, Pumpkin Spice Blend, Sweet Heat, Mild BBQ Rub, and Savoury Blend. Students will be selling the spice packages at the Kids Farmers’ Market in New Glasgow, N.S., Sunday. After that, anyone interested can contact Salt Springs Elementary School. For more Nova Scotia news, visit our dedicated provincial page
