In the spring of 2021, Dummerston School was awarded a $10,000 Farm to School and Early Childhood Grant from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Farm and Markets (VAAFM). This unique grant includes customized professional development provided by Vermont FEED. At Dummerston School, principal Julianne Eagan decided to use that professional development to launch a new buddy classroom program with a Farm to School and outdoor learning focus.
On November 9th, after two long years with very limited community events due to COVID-19, Newbrook Elementary School hosted its first Harvest Dinner since 2019. This was a beautiful event, showcasing student-made art, donations from the community, soups cooked by students, staff, and community members, a shared meal, and a successful fundraising effort for the Farm to School program. It also started with a beautiful land acknowledgment led by students.
For the first time since the fall of 2019, Oak Grove School held its annual Harvest Dinner celebration with families. A longstanding tradition at the school, this event features food grown in the school garden and harvested and prepared by students. This year, the dinner was attended by over 50 families and was held during the school’s fall open house.
Rising 7th and 8th graders had a unique and delicious opportunity to hone their culinary skills over the summer thanks to the leadership of Brattleboro Area Middle School (BAMS) teacher Marissa Fuoroli. During the first week of July, 31 students participated in a Farm to Table-themed camp, offered for free to all BAMS students. They began the week with more straightforward projects like fruit smoothies, homemade pizza, and cinnamon rolls. For the final day of the camp, they worked together to make a 3-course meal featuring a chilled creamy cucumber soup, a main course of ratatouille, and a chocolate chia seed pudding with raspberry sauce for dessert. Guest teachers from Edible Brattleboro and Food Connects supported this culminating feast. These extra hands made making multiple dishes at once much easier for Brattleboro Enrichment Activities for Middle School (BEAMS) program staff.
As preparation for the cooking, students discussed the various ingredients in the recipes and decided which ingredients could be locally grown.
“Has anyone ever grown cucumbers in their garden or seen them growing in the school garden?”
“YES!”
“What about lemons?”
Some students were unsure and thought that perhaps lemons could be grown in Vermont, while others were reasonably confident that lemons needed a warmer climate to thrive. This discussion invited a deeper conversation about the different conditions plants need to grow.
When it came time for cooking, students worked in pairs to peel, chop, and measure the ingredients and follow the recipe. The result was a feast for the whole group, served on the lawn in front of the school.
““At the end of the smoothie-making day, (my son) proudly told me that his smoothie came out very tasty, and he is making smoothies at home for himself now.””
Students left the camp feeling more confident in the kitchen. In fact, Jenny Conathan, mother of rising 7th-grader Liam Conathan-Leach, said, ”In the past, Liam was reluctant to make his own smoothies and always asked me to make them. At the end of the smoothie-making day, he proudly told me that his smoothie came out very tasty, and he is making smoothies at home for himself now.” When asked for his secret smoothie recipe, Liam replied, “I like to keep it very simple, with bananas, strawberries, and orange juice.” Yum!
In our March Newsletter, we wrote about Bellows Falls Union High School students competing at Junior Iron Chef VT. Due to a winter storm, the competition was postponed and was rescheduled for April 2nd. Due to rescheduling, teammate Kevin Patterson could not compete, so Joey Jacques had to cook solo—a rarity at Jr Iron Chef, where teams are usually three or more students.
However, cooking solo did not damper the team's abilities. In fact, Joey won the Mise en Place award cooking by himself! Quite a remarkable achievement!
Coach Jake Gallogly remarked that “watching Joey cook was pretty awesome. I don't know if he noticed or not, but all of the judges and many of the coaches kept coming up to me and asking if he was really competing alone. They were really impressed.”
So Jake wasn’t completely surprised when they announced Joey’s name as the winner. But the extra reward came when the captain of the judges told Jake, “his dish was by far the best, and they’d pay for it in a restaurant!” I had felt exactly the same when I tasted it during a practice session.
Jr. Iron Chef helps build confidence in students and offers them a unique opportunity. Jake reflects, “Jr. Iron Chef is a great program. All three times that I have had the opportunity to coach a team, I feel that the kids walked away with more confidence in the kitchen. Cooking aside, I think some of the students that participate in the program aren't always involved in competitive sports, so showing up to the expo center with all the energy and the big crowd of people there has to be exciting. Everyone needs a few butterflies in their stomach once in a while!”
We’ll be waiting with anticipation to see if Joey competes again next year.
In early March, the 2nd-grade students carried on the Vermont tradition of tapping maple trees in the waning days of winter. We tapped two maple trees at school, neither of which was a sugar maple, but instead a Norway maple and silver maple. Thanks to Librarian Jody Hauser for scouting and identifying our trees! The Norway maple has a very slow sap flow, but the silver maple began flowing immediately! Mrs. Kane’s brother Thad came to help us tap the trees, and we were thrilled to get that hands-on experience that generations of Vermonters have had before us.
Later in the week, we enjoyed “sugar on snow,” using maple syrup that Mrs. Stoodley’s family had boiled last year. We took a walk down School Street to Leah’s house to experience their sugaring operation on Friday afternoon. We have all decided that maple syrup is DELICIOUS. We thank Tim and Whitney Patterson, Ryan and Karen Stoodley, and Thad and Jan Guild for helping us understand the experience of making “liquid gold!” We also had a blind taste test to compare silver, Norway, and sugar maple sap to decide which is the sweetest. The results were surprising! While most students thought the sugar maple sap would be the sweetest, the taste test indicated that the Norway maple sap actually tasted the sweetest to the students, as shown in our graph.
Erica Frank in our cafeteria baked up delicious maple-sweetened blueberry oatmeal cakes for the students to enjoy. They were a hit!
Farm to School efforts continue to expand with regular taste tests and activities tied to Harvest of the Month. And we’re getting ready to ramp up our garden, with cold frames already set up and a garden workday planned with help from the Rotary Club to repair and build new raised beds for Spring. Stay tuned for more!
The youngest Oak Grove School community members recently completed a delicious in-depth study of local foods, gardening, and cooking! Oak Grove School’s Pre-K program was one of the 2021 Early Childhood Education CSA grant recipients through the Vermont Agency of Agriculture. In its first year, this grant subsidizes 80% of the cost of a community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm share at the Vermont farm of your choice. Oak Grove’s Pre-K chose to work with Full Plate Farm in Dummerston, VT.
13 lucky 4 to 5-year-old students got to enjoy many locally grown treats this year, including radishes, kale, beets, scallions, brussels sprouts, and winter squash. It was their first time trying some of these new flavors for many students. Pre-K staff Jen Tourville and Jamie Champney and garden coordinator Tara Gordon found creative ways to inspire the students to try new things. Adding mystery to the tasting lessons was one successful approach—from the five senses mystery box to mystery smoothies, student curiosity was encouraged.
Each week, Jen and Tara put a different produce item into the five senses mystery box—an oatmeal container with a sock sleeve attached by a rubber band. They invited the students to put their hand in and feel the item and describe it with words, strengthening their language skills while also piquing their curiosity.
Recently, Jamie made a mystery smoothie for the class with bananas, frozen berries, yogurt, and a mystery ingredient (spinach). “Some students had never been willing to taste a smoothie before because they were already convinced that they wouldn’t like it,” Jamie said. “Adding mystery to the activity made all students curious enough to try it, and big surprise—they all liked it!” After they had tasted the smoothie and made guesses about the secret ingredient, Jamie revealed the spinach to her surprised students.
Produce that arrived weekly in the CSA share helped students make a connection to their school garden, where many of the same plants were growing. Tara regularly took students to the garden to harvest produce, and they combined their school garden-grown produce with produce from Full Plate Farm to cook some delicious recipes. The class cooked twice a week throughout the season, which was new and wonderful! Here are several of the most popular things they made:
Fresh vegetable spring rolls
Many soups, including stone soup and root vegetable soup
Sweet and salty radishes
Coleslaw
Jamie shared that often the students’ first response to the idea of new food was, “Yuck, I don’t like this!” but she discovered that when they cut the veggies into fun shapes or tried adding interesting flavors, for example, agave syrup to change the flavor of the radishes, students were pleasantly surprised to learn that in fact, they did like that food after all! For the more reluctant students, Tara introduced a five senses taste test, where the students closed their eyes and sometimes even plugged their noses when trying new food to focus on the texture of the food in their mouths.
The entire Oak Grove community benefitted from this in-depth study of local food and cooking by the Pre-K in several ways:
Food cooked by the Pre-K was often shared with school staff as a special meal. The staff got to enjoy several different soups and a root vegetable casserole prepared by the students and their teachers.
Bags of extra fresh produce were sent home regularly for students to share with their families. The produce came with a small sample of the meal that the students had made in school and the recipe, and families were encouraged to try the same recipe at home.
Extra produce was also shared with other classrooms in the school. For example, Erek Tuma’s 4th-grade class benefitted from pre-K’s abundance of kale for their kale Harvest of the Month taste test.
The classroom curriculum connections were particularly rich, linking cooking, gardening, and produce exploration with science and literacy. A visit from Ragan Anderson supported the program, nutrition educator from the Brattleboro Food Co-op, who came into the classroom, read stories with the students, and did a cooking project featuring butternut squash.
Jamie is already thinking about what she will do differently next season to improve the program. Some of her goals are:
Increase family feedback and family engagement. For example, send home every recipe with ingredients and invite families into school to participate in cooking and harvesting.
Build more community throughout the school. For example, have cooking buddies from other classes and cook for other classes.
Cook something once a week for staff.
Overall, this program was a huge success! As a result, the students are very excited about the school garden, and they look forward to cooking and gardening as a regular part of their weekly routine. Support from garden coordinator Tara Gordon was a key component to the success of this program, allowing students to spend time in the garden every week and engage in cooking activities throughout the whole season.
One of the best meals I’ve had since moving to Vermont two years ago was served to me late on a Monday afternoon by a 16-year-old in an industrial kitchen at a local high school. Why, oh why have I never eaten mushroom katsu before? I posed this question to my partner, a professional chef, as soon as I got home. (He also agreed this dish, sweet potato curry with mushroom katsu, served over coconut rice, was one of the best he’d had in Vermont).
I attended a weekly meeting of the Bellows Falls Union High School (BFUHS) Jr Iron Chef Team, where they were practicing for their competition debut on March 12 (UPDATE: the event was delayed due to weather).
Jr Iron Chef began in Vermont in 2008 and has grown into a hugely popular event, with over 5,000 students participating in the past few years. Jake Gallogly, the Nutrition Assistant at BFUHS, is a Jr Iron Chef veteran, having coached a Twin Valley Team to a Crowd Pleaser Award in 2016. He thought starting a team at the high school level would be an excellent opportunity for the students in the Foods Class to expand their knowledge and experience.
Senior Kevin Patterson and junior Joey Jacques have met eight times since Jake started the team. Both students had significant experience cooking with their families at home, and both also mentioned the techniques they had learned under Jakes's guidance. Joey shared, “I 100% learned new techniques and vocabulary here. Julienne, mince, mise en place. Learning how to do things correctly is a big thing here.”
Watching them in the kitchen, you can easily see the professional training in action. Kevin meticulously cleans every surface on which he works. He’s also precise and measured in all his cuts and preparation. Moving through the kitchen, it’s become second nature to give the “behind,” “coming through,” and “in-between” vocal markers so the young chefs avoid any unnecessary bumps and spills. And both Joey and Kevin have also seemed to embrace the idea that chefs don’t rely on perfect measurements. Kevin added “a splash” of sesame oil to the marinade; they seasoned everything “to taste” (and without any measuring spoons). As the dish was nearing completion, Jake reminded them, “Think about salt. Think about flavor. See what it needs.”
Jr Iron Chef VT has some stringent rules around recipe development. Dishes must be vegetarian, nut-free, and feature 3 to 5 ingredients from Vermont. They developed the recipe together and with some trial and error. Both Kevin and Joey admit that while the dish is new to them, they find it quite delicious. And it gets better every time they make it!
Stay tuned next month for an update on how the team fared in the (still to be rescheduled) competition.
Looking for ideas to bring outdoor learning up a notch at your school this fall? Or creative ways to engage with students around farm, food, and nutrition education during this school year?
As part of the COVID-19 mitigation plan, school staff is encouraged to incorporate the outdoors as much as is reasonable in their instruction or daily routines this fall. Our Farm to School Resource Hub is a great place to look for ideas and support for outdoor learning, school gardens, and cooking with students during COVID-19.
Here are a few of our favorites:
Cultivating Joy and Wonder: Free downloadable resource book with over 75 classroom food, farm, and nutrition activities. This book is a great one-stop resource for elementary school teachers interested in incorporating more Farm to School education into their curriculum.
Teaching Outside 101: A 15-page guide from the Bonnyvale Environmental Education Center (BEEC) all about how to get your classroom outside. This guide covers the nitty-gritty logistics of outdoor education and idea starters for outdoor lessons in each academic subject.
Cooking with Students: Guidelines developed by Food Connects in partnership with the VT FTS Network to help teachers cook with kids while staying COVID-19 safe.
We also want to highlight Discover Dairy’s Adopt a Cow program. This free program provides an exciting, year-long experience for the classroom where students get an inside look at dairy farming while paired with a calf from a Vermont dairy farm. Classrooms receive regular progress updates, cow photos, live chats from the farm, activity sheets for students, suggested lessons that follow Common CORE standards, and opportunities to write letters to the calf. Register for this school year by September 15.
We are wishing you all a healthy start to the 2021-2022 school year!
