Apple Picking
Septermber 26, 2025
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Apple Picking
After a wet day on campus yesterday, the sunshine was appreciated today as we all came together to enjoy the autumn bounty! The orchards at Meadowbrook Farm were brimming with families experiencing one of the great joys that our environment has to offer this time of year. For longer than some of you parents in our community have been alive, we have been picking apples at Meadowbrook Farm. It has become a yearly tradition that we all look forward to and enjoy. Besides the tradition, apple picking on the farm holds an even bigger value in the breadth and depth it lends to our curriculum.
From our youngest Sunnies, to our oldest Cardinals, and our Flower Patch Kids and Bluebirds in between, our "carry your own bag" curriculum is important, as it links to our values and understanding of child development. It is also an exercise for parents; to remember that your child is ready to make choices that are right for them, and experience the lessons of them, too. Whether your child chooses to pick and carry one single apple, or to fill their bag to the brim and flex their muscles carrying them, they all get an equally rewarding experience in doing it for themselves!
Apples have an interesting history - celebrated as uniquely American in identity, but introduced from central Asia originally via the Silk Road, and by European settlers. And yet here we are, at The Randolph School, picking and celebrating apples year after year as they hold a great deal of our fall curriculum work. We can compare and contrast the trees at the farm with the few apple trees we have here on campus. We hold a school wide apple taste test. We sort apples, count them, and learn about the life cycle of the trees as well as the nomenclature for the parts of the apple. We use descriptive adjectives to write about apples. This luscious and abundant fruit allows us the opportunity to get productive in the kitchen, where we exercise our math muscles once again. Later, the apples are ground and squeezed into the best tasting, child-made apple cider in the world! The apple is featured strongly in our Harvest Feast tradition later in November, as well.
Our apple picking experience ties the children, indeed all of us, to this land and this community. Apple Picking at Meadowbrook Farm is our first big tradition of the year. It is also our first All Family event of the year. It reflects on our identity as a community as we continue in this season and in our curricular cycles.
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