They make strawberry vinaigrette, bring in fixings such as cherry tomatoes and shredded carrots and harvest lettuce from the eight Burpee Gourmet Blend lettuce plants they grow in the aeroponic tower garden in the back of their classroom.

“I tell the kids it’s like an ice cream sundae party, but with salad,” Pittman said. “They had a blast last year. They were going back for seconds.”

Growing lettuce in class is just one of the methods Pittman employs to help her students understand where the food they eat comes from.

“I want them to understand that farmers are behind the food they eat from the grocery store,” she said. “There is some person, somebody, behind even the clothes they wear.”

For her efforts in incorporating agriculture into her daily lesson plans, Pittman received a national Excellence in Teaching about Agriculture award from the National Agriculture in the Classroom Organization. She is one of eight teachers across the country to be selected for the award and will be honored at the NAITCO conference in Kansas City, Mo., in June.

Earlier this year, she was named Virginia Agriculture in the Classroom Teacher of the Year.

The mission of Agriculture in the Classroom, which started in 1981, is to help children understand the impact of agriculture in their daily lives. AITC provides resources, training and support to educators and schools. In Virginia, the program has served more than 16,000 teachers since its inception.

During the school year, Pittman and her students run the “First Grade Farmers Market.” They raise different types of leaf lettuce in the tower garden, which does not require soil and is self-watering. Pittman teaches the children how to harvest the greens by pinching off mature leaves with their fingers. They pack it in gallon bags and sell it for $3 a bag to their parents and to Bowling Green Elementary faculty.

“The parents place orders with us on Thursday and they pick up their orders on Friday,” Pittman said. All of the money goes back into the project, purchasing fertilizer, seeds or grow lights for the tower garden.

This isn’t the only way Pittman’s students are introduced to farming, she said.

“If it’s a lesson on sorting, some teachers will use blocks, but I’ll pull out corn, soybeans or wheat,” Pittman said. “So they’re learning the sorting, but also the differences between the types of crops.”

“There’s no subject that you can’t squeeze agriculture into,” she said with a smile.

The class is also participating in the nationwide “First Peas to the Table” contest, sponsored by the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture. The goal is to be the student team that grows the greatest amount of peas, measured in cups, from 20 pea seeds. The seeds must have been planted after Feb. 20 and will be shelled and harvested on May 15.

The contest is based on the foundation’s book of the year, “First Peas to the Table” by Susan Grigsby, which tells about a similar contest Thomas Jefferson and his Monticello neighbors would hold each spring.

Pittman grew up in suburbia, but married into a farming family. She and her husband of 15 years—a blacksmith—own a cattle farm in Hanover County. They currently have 19 Black Angus cows, which they raise for all-natural beef, and eight horses.

She stayed home on the farm full time with her two boys until the oldest was 11.

“For those 11 years, it was all farming,” she said.

Pittman said there is “nothing better” than raising children on a farm.

“It teaches kids how to work and what it takes to care for something,” she said. “And I can’t remember the last time any of us went to the doctor.”

But she said there is nothing glamorous about farming.

“It’s expensive to run a small farm and there’s not a lot of money in it,” she said. “You do it for the love. I tell my students I’m driving the tractor for an hour every morning before I get dressed to look like this.”

Pittman said that her fellow teachers know her dedication to connecting children with agriculture and are starting to ask her questions about how they can do it themselves. And she will be working with the Caroline County 4–H club to build outdoor, raised-bed gardens around Bowling Green Elementary School.

Pittman said that last year, some of her students turned their noses up at the idea of a salad party.

“I did have some of the ‘eww, veggies’ reactions,” she said. “But when they see the lettuce growing, they have more respect for it and ownership of it and they’re more apt to try it.”