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.
After a break forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, NewBrook Elementary School was able to host Farm and Field Day for the first time since 2019. The entire student body took a break from academics to spend an afternoon outdoors learning about food, recycling, and the natural environment.
A multitude of community volunteers came out to run “stations”—where groups of students rotated through. The Windham County Game Warden, Dave Taddei, had a table full of pelts for students to explore and learn about. Giant Journey Farm brought adult rabbits and kits. Meadows Bee Farm had a faux milking station and taught students about June’s Harvest of the Month dairy. Food Connects made strawberry banana “nice cream” (sweetened only with fruit), and students assembled and ate their own pizzas, cooked by a West River Community Project volunteer. Amy Duffy, the school’s Farm to School Coordinator, made herbal salt scrubs with students. And the team from Windham Solid Waste ran a recycling relay! Art teacher Suzanne Paugh engaged students in making a mural for the garden shed out of recycled plastic!
Parents Elizabeth Erickson and Sara Webb, working with NewBrook’s Farm to School Committee, led the efforts to organize the event. Heather Sperling, the school’s wood-fired pizza expert and Farm to School veteran, and Amy Duffy, the school’s FTS Coordinator, were also central to the effort. Thank you so much to all the community members and families who volunteered to help with this event. Principal Scotty Tabachnick said, “it was just beautiful to see everyone outside, enjoying the day as a community again. We’re so thankful to everyone who supports our school.”
It was a wonderful day for all, and NewBrook Elementary School looks forward to hosting more events for students and families.
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!
Stuffing scarecrows, painting pumpkins, cooking lunch over hot coals, and playing musical chairs… These are not your everyday school activities. But this is how the students at Westminster Center School spent the morning of October 29, when they celebrated their first Farm and Field Day.
Students from grades K-6 took part in six different activities crafted to link students to the outdoors and celebrate the harvest season. In addition to the excitement of scarecrows, pumpkins, and musical chairs (renamed “Boo-tiful Music!” in honor of the holiday), students went on a story walk, harvested kale from the garden for lunch, watched working farm equipment in action, and watched as the chicken for their kale salad cooked over coals in the outdoor cinder block kitchen, the “Cinder Cafe,” built especially for this event.
Despite the frigid temperatures, students were excited to be outside. “The best part is you get to have fresh air!” remarked Scarlett, a second-grader. “I’m having fun! It’s very fun!” exclaimed first-grader Anthony Lakeside. And fourth-grader Jenny said her favorite activity of the day was harvesting kale. “You get to peel all the leaves off!”
The librarian and Garden Coordinator, Mandy Walsh, said she was inspired by a similar event at Newbrook Elementary several years ago. Mandy has been growing the Farm to School program at Westminster for years and was excited to host her first Farm and Field Day. “We are so lucky to have the resources of gardens, animals, woods, and fields, and we live in a historically agricultural community. The day was about celebrating what's around us, coming together as a school community, and being joyful.” In reflecting on the success of the event, Mandy remarked, “I think that in the big picture, the best student learning happens when students get to be outside, working together, trying new things (food and activities). These are the days our students remember with fondness when they think back on their elementary school days.”
The Farm to School Team at Westminster is already planning future events and is flush with ideas of building on the tradition they’ve started. One thought was that perhaps next year, the sixth-graders could lead the stations rather than the teachers. Cheers to Westminster Center School for growing and cultivating leaders in the Farm to School Movement!
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!
Educators from 9 schools across Windham County gathered at Wild Carrot Farm in early May to learn about mushroom cultivation from farmer Jesse Kayan and recently retired 3rd-grade teacher from Oak Grove Deb Pierotti. Not only is mushroom cultivation relatively simple once you have the right materials, but the connections to learning standards come easy, as demonstrated by past students’ work Deb brought to share.
Mushrooms can look otherworldly and inspire awe. Their unique properties spark curiosity. One example is the Barometer Earthstar fungus, a few of which Deb brought to share. This mushroom opens or closes depending on its moisture level. Deb’s passion demonstrated that engaging lessons are those that not only captivate the student but the instructor as well.
Learning scientific observation skills, writing and composition, and history through the lens of fungi helps make the content stick as well! Tara Davis, a parent at Oak Grove School, brought her son’s Mushroom Journal from when he was in Deb’s third-grade class, sharing that it had not only been a highlight of his year but his entire time at Oak Grove.
Jesse helped make it easy to bring the workshop back to participants' schools. Along with Caitlin Burlett, Jesse’s wife and farming partner, they prepped logs, a wax station, and had pre-purchased spores to inoculate the logs.
Each participant got to try out two different cultivation techniques: a “totem” method used slices of logs with shiitake spore sandwiched between them, and a “plug” method, where many holes are drilled into a log and filled with oyster spore.
The main lesson learned was that it’s all about location. Armed with their two inoculated logs and some lesson ideas, Jesse tasked the participants to find a cool, dark, damp forest spot for their logs and to wait patiently for the mushrooms to emerge. In the meantime, we’re excited to see what new lessons and units grow out of this workshop!
