Step Right Up With What You Got, Add it All to the Big Soup Pot!

Where does our food come? Do we like to eat by ourselves or together? Who makes our food and how do they make it? What can we cook ourselves? What does it mean to be polite? What does it mean to share? These are the questions we worked to answer as we extended our work around family and school by delving into a study on food and community. 

Like most good projects, we started this one by looking in our own backyard. Since September children have been grazing on the broccoli and kale growing in our garden. To take a closer look at cooking at school and at home we rooted around in the sideyard carefully smelling, tasting and picking the different fresh herbs and then made a giant dried herb collection. Some of the herbs we used in cooking projects at school and some we sent home in little linen sachets.

Children's hands and eyes grew stronger as they worked hard to sew fabric scraps onto the bag and then to pinch the herbs into the bag. In the spirit of sharing, children brought the bags home to share from our garden to your home.

To get even closer to ideas of sharing and community we did several extended, larger projects and then lots of smaller works. First we read the book Uncle Willie's Soup Kitchen about a young boy who spends the day with his Uncle at his regular volunteer post in a local soup kitchen. As city dwellers, many of our children have experiences with homeless folks and they were invited to share their ideas and experiences and to process them through play. Children were introduced to a shared understanding of homelessness by studying a picture in the story that shows a man sleeping on a bench next to a cart of his belongings. Natasha, who has spent years volunteering with homeless, led the conversation and the play.Children then could choose to be a visitor to the soup kitchen or a worker there.

Play is a totally safe and appropriate way for both our youngest and oldest children to develop and clarify their understandings around complex issues, like homelessness, that they are already exposed to but not usually invited to participate in.

To further our thinking around the importance of food and sharing we partnered with parents Mark and Tulin and their organization We are Family which provides food and other services to seniors living in Columbia Heights. Teachers worked to conceive of a framework where the seniors and the children could each come to the proverbial table with something to share. Melissa decided on "Our Hands" and the work our hands can do as a way to for our preschoolers and seniors to come together. Melissa read from the book These Hands about a grandfather telling his grandson all the different things his hands can do, like knead bread. In simple language and lovely pictures the grandfather shares how he used to work in a segregated bread factory and how the workers had to join together and fight for the right to work where they wanted to and to handle the food. And the boy shares what he can do with his hands, like tying his shoes.

Our oldest children discussed these issues of fairness and working together for change and then went through making signs of their own and signed a petition. P.S., a sign and petition agitating for social justice is probably an archetypal ALG literacy worksheet.  Children talking and listening lots is obviously crucial for language and literacy development. Words are passed around and polished like treasures at ALG and children's delight in words and using them in ways that are meaningful and playful is evident.

Then the red and the blue group used their hands to make a beautiful shared collage. We traced our hands on the collage and made ALG's first ever hand-turkeys to share with the seniors as a gift. Melissa invited children to think about their hands, what they look like and what they are capable of, and then captured those ideas in a poem. When we met the seniors, we invited them to share stories about their hands and added those stories to our poem. The result was lovely and evocative with lines like:

"My hands are the color of chocolate cupcakes

My hands can eat broccoli

My hands can make puppets made out of socks talk"

And,

"When I worked, I used my hands to clean office buildings for the federal government.  I did this for a long time.  They used to ask me to sit at a desk at my job, but that always made me fall asleep; I needed to keep my hands busy!"

For our youngest children how do we get closer to these ideas of community and food? Well we sit in our little group community and we touch food!

 We examine it, chop it, scoop it, touch it, smell it and, later, cook it up and taste it. We share space and materials as we work towards the common goal of getting the pumpkin ready for eating! Anchored by our reading of Pumpkin Soup a book about, well, pumpkins and also about taking turns and sharing, our youngest literally immersed themselves in sharing, turn taking and pumpkin preparing. Then we all got to share in the soup together.

Every time we made food to share in this study from pizza to tortillas to deviled eggs and more, we worked to have children politely ask for and receive their food. Each "please" and "thank you," each serving of food to others, was an opportunity to practice the ideas of community and sharing.

Many of our cooking projects were anchored in a children's literature and music like Pete's a Pizza and Tortillas para Mama. After reading the classic The Giant Jam Sandwhich, children were invited to make sandwiches of their own and to practice all the myriad steps like how to twist open tops, how to spread with a butter knife and more that goes into making a sandwich. Children also got to reanact the story in an interactive puppet show.

You know it's not all seamless success at ALG nor in life (smile). A trip to the farm to see where our food came from turned into something more like a recreation of the biblical flood then a study on food sources. The waterlogged day was mostly "a wash" (hahahaha) but kids did get to pet a goat, collect a ton of apples which we made into delicious applesauce

and to practice our writing and representation when we made a thank you card.

After the older groups met the seniors from We Are Family we were ready to begin our food drive for them in earnest.We brought food from our homes and the store and then spent several days using our burgeoning math skills to sort and classify the food into different categories. We used our number sense to count how much we had and to see knew we needed more of. Food gathered and delivered, new friends made, our hands were put to good use indeed. When we had our ALG feast in November we shared our Hands poem with our families, we shared our food with each other and bellies and hearts seemed nice and full. 

Where else do we eat? Who makes our food? Who works with food? Where do some of our own Moms and Dads work? These questions led us to a neighborhood diner, The Coupe. At the diner we were met by Grace's mom and dad who work there and given a tour of the restaurant. We got to meet some of the different folks who work there and take a tour of the "back of the house." We learned about the different tools that workers use to do their job. After the tour we sat at the tables and got to again practice courtesy as we made our choice from the menu and politely asked our server for our food and then thanked them when they brought it to us. Bagels were schmeared and devoured, oatmeal was slupped and even a napkin or two was used properly. Our oldest two groups saw the 16th street bus pull away as we walked to the stop and so we decided to walk back on the sunny, sunny day and got to see and feel how close our school is to The Coupe. Again the children practiced their reading and writing in the meaningful context of sending a thank-you card to The Coupe for hosting us. 

 Over the next several weeks we processed and deepened that intial field work experience by representing a restaurant in several different areas with several different materials. We built The Coupe out of blocks and showed our attention to detail as we even made small black aprons for the waiters to wear.

 Some children built The Coupe out of legos and we got to again immerse ourself in the rituals of polite interaction when ordering, serving and the adult world of work.

We rely on each other lots at ALG. At different times in any given day it is an ideal, a practice and a necesity for everyone to pitch in. At clean up time, for example, we talk about how if everyone helps it gets done quickly and how we all have 
jobs to do.

Stone soup, the idea from a classic children's story, with everyone bringing a little part to generate a large whole, provides a tasty way to experience these ideas. We read many different versions of the story, sang a folk song version of it at circle and children began to bring in vegetables from home to share.  Over two days we chopped and peeled and prepared the veggies for cooking before adding them all to our big soup pot. Thick with different veggies with heavy pours of community and sharing the soup was tried by all and enjoyed by most.  Our sharing food together continued as different families responded to a call for round breads. We ate bagels, pancakes, tortillas, a Swedish tea ring,

Finnish Pulla, Dutch Oliebol and homemade round wheat bread. As parents and grandparents came to share the bread we also got to share stories of how different folks celebrate with food.

For Halloween, the children got to imagine how monsters celebrate with food and wrote an appropiately foul recipe for mummy stew--p.s. phonetically spelling "Zombie Drool" is also an archetypal ALG literacy worksheet. 

Our last food focus came in the (round) form of gingerbread. We read several versions of the classic Gingerbread Man and sang a song at circle time where we got to practice counting ten gingerbread kids and articulating our fingers. Children were invited to come and build their own gingerbread kid in the block area. Children stretched thier math skills as they worked with shape, pattern, repetition and variation to create a design that was pleasing to them. We made a spicy, ginger smelling playdough and children got to create and recreate designs in that medium as well. 

 

After a long, deep look into food and community, the year began to draw to a close and our study with it. To culminate our work, pulling together all the different threads of social studies, literacy and math we began the hard work of opening a restaurant of our own to run the last days of school. Many children worked together to make round gingerbread cookies (sweetened with honey and molasses) while other older children used their growing phomemic awareness to write menus.          

  

In playing out the restaurant the children got a final chance to experience the ideas of reading from a menu, making a choice, politely asking for food, thanking their server when they receive their meal and then "paying" for the food when done. These actions are so simple for (most of) us grown ups but for a young child they are a complicated synthesis of many language, social, self-control and mathematical skills. Bringing one plate of food to one child, learning the pattern of ask, listen, give, check require mathematical ideas of one to one correspondence and pattern. Some children playing waiter were able to make tally marks or other symbols on their writing pad to record the order (i.e. data). And other children wandered off while waiting for a teacher to tie on their aprons and so their tasks ran more to practiticng patience and persistence--life long skills indeed. 

For this study on Food and Community we leaned especially hard on our families. For every field trip you chaperoned, for every onion and carrot you brought, for every bread you made to share, for every cooking project you helped lead, for every muddy outfit you washed after your child made "mud cakes,"

for every bit of community spririt you brought, ALG thanks you so very much.

A good time was had by all. See you next time! Love, ALG