Harvesting Links

November14, 2025

Sunnies(3,4,5s)

Harvest Time

We have been adapting and preparing for winter in many different ways, from the clothes we wear to the foods we eat to our daily rhythms. With all the bounty that autumn has offered us to explore, we have been thinking deeply about color, shape, and line, with particular attention to gourds/pumpkins, leaves, and apples. We have explored those autumnal elements using tools from various arts and sciences, as we will share below. We are also getting ready for Harvest Feast, a culminating celebration to the season! That means using what we have learned about fall to create special foods and decorations for our upcoming all-school event. We have been eagerly counting down each day and are so excited to share our creations with our Randolph community.

Gourd Still Life Drawings
The first step before noticing what has changed is noticing what is. For the first time this year, we used a "thinking routine" at Morning Gathering to explore a work of art that would inspire us to create our own. A thinking routine is a term that originates with Harvard's Project Zero research. Thinking routines are typically a set of questions or a series of steps that help teachers scaffold and support children's thinking. Many of the thinking routines created were designed for older children, but can be adapted for use with the preschool age group. On this occasion, we started with a printed out picture of a painting, which we all looked at quietly for a moment, before the teachers led the children through a version of the "See, Think, Wonder" thinking routine.

Apple Taste Test
We took part in an apple “taste test,” as a way to familiarize ourselves with the way different apples can taste, practice comparing and contrasting, and develop descriptive vocabulary. This year, we tested three varieties of apples: Red Delicious, Granny Smith, and Golden Delicious. After each student tasted all three apples, they wrote their name or used their name stamp, with teacher support as needed, on a red, yellow, or green circle to place on our chart to track our class preferences. Earlier in the month, we created this paper by printing with a vairitey of circles using recycled materials. Children also helped to cut out the circles, carefully driving on the marked "road" with their scissors. After everyone tasted and voted, we tallied the votes and discovered that Red Delicious was the overall favorite with nine votes, Granny Smith, with seven votes each and Golden Delicious with four votes.

Making Apple Sauce
Bringing bags of apples back to school from Meadowbrook farm inspired apple play as well as apple cooking. We used the apples to make applesauce for Harvest Feast, doing all the jobs of washing, peeling, chopping, mashing, and milling the apples. We had to work together while taking turns with all the different tools. We used a combination of fine and large motor skills, such as cranking the apple peeler or dicing with the chopper. The milling of the cooked apples was of great interest, as children curiously watched to see how the mechanics worked. The children were eager to help and proud of their contribution to our shared Feast. Using real tools and being able to do “real work” in the process of creating a dish that they are able to eat and enjoy as well as share with their peers and older friends helps foster a sense of pride and community. Harvest Feast is a school-wide celebration of the garden work we have done all year long, a connection between this year and the last and the next, and a time to gather in gratitude with our community. We did sneak a little taste of the applesauce just to make sure it was up to our standards!

Click here to read more about the Sunnies Harvest Time.

Flower Patch Kids(5,6,7s)

Harvest Projects

This time of year yields a variety of things from nature that children are just so curious about! We can't let one leaf fall from a tree without many children noticing and watching it fall to the ground or running after it to try and catch it. Finding treasures in the garden beds and digging up the bounty of last years work brings children such joy and excitement to discover what has been growing. These two concepts are what is fueling our Harvest Projects this year. Teachers are pairing up and working with your kiddos who voted on which project they wanted to spend their time working on, to dive deeper into these topics and create and learn in a hands on and tangible way!

3 Sisters Exploration

The Indigenious Haudensaunee people who were to first to inhabit the land our school is on have cultivated this growing technique that our school gardens also have used with great success. The tale of the 3 Sisters depicts each vegetable as a sister, one not able to be without the others. It allows the story to weave in the true growth patterns of these vegetables and why each one is so important to the others success.

We started our journey with these 3 Sisters by listening to the tale again and then acting out the story, where children had opportunities to play different parts and practice listening and recall for what would be coming next. We added characters that we thought would be nearby like animals in the forest, the bright Sun, Wind blowing around and a Fire. It was such fun to embody these characters and take on the persona of whoever or whatever we were! The children were so engaged that our plans to make felt versions of the 3 Sisters may help us perform a reenactment with them throughout our project time together!

One of our project choices was to create a collage using dried beans and corn! Some friends chose to make patterns, while others created different designs! It was exciting to watch how each child interacted with these materials. Some were super focused on collecting a specific color of bean while others were eager to engage with these by attaching as many as they could!

We then looked more closely at two pumpkins which are part of the squash family. The children took turns noticing and describing what they saw. Phrases like "it has a lot of lines that go up and down" , "the stem is tall and is curved", "this one looks a little bigger than the other one" were all great observations to help us with what was coming next. We worked on a labeling activity, helping us know all the parts of a pumpkin and the names that go along with those parts.

Our next adventure with this project is carving open the pumpkins and collecting all the seeds from inside, counting them to figure out how many were in there and then roasting them up to serve for our Harvest Feast! Before we did that we gave the children a moment to think about how many seeds could be inside. We talked about the word Estimation and the meaning of it. We noticed the sizes of the pumpkins and each kid estimated a number hoping they would be the closest to the true answer hidden inside the pumpkin.

To get this answer comes the fun and messy part! Kiddos scooped out seeds from inside and seperated the pulp from the seeds creating piles to count and a pile to transport to the compost. Using 100s charts as math tools we counted all the seeds that were harvested and then compared which of the pumpkins had more seeds! We then went back to our estimation guesses and compared the real number to what we thought. The children were so surprised to see so many seeds that came out of these pumpkins!

Final results: Pumpkin A-558 Pumpkin B-477

Scooping out the pumpkin pulp!

"It feels slimy and wet!"

Counting seeds using 100s charts!

So many seeds!

Leaf Exploration

Some Flower Patch Kids have begun exploring the fascinating world of leaves and appreciating all gifts we receive from trees. The kiddos are discovering leaves' parts, shapes, and colors through hands-on fun like leaf rubbings, sorting, graphing, and even making cheerful leaf confetti! They raked and played in a gigantic pile of leaves on the back field. Large motor skills, collaborative raking work, and turn taking for safety were all things the children exercised. They also really worked hard on their hand strength using a hole punch for the confetti and using scissors to cut out a cardboard tracing of a leaf each child chose. Building their hand muscles will help them with fine motor skills, such as writing, art-making, self-care and more. Then some kiddos chose to turn their cardboard leaf into a kite!

We have discovered how trees and humans share the gift of respiration and experiment with planting to see growth in action. What are the three elements most living plants need to grow and live? Air (our carbon dioxide we exhale), water, and sunlight. What happens when the chlorophyll uses photosynthesis? The plant, or tree, makes glucose for energy, and in that process it respires oxygen into the air (which we inhale). We are learning about the parts of a leaf and will be labeling our leaf rubbings, too.

Rereading a favorite classic, Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert, inspired the kiddos to make their own leaf creatures. They were so creative, using the petioles as whiskers on a leaf cat, or little wood chips as eyes for a leaf person.

Once we collected and identified our leaves, exploring their various sizes, types (simple, lobed, or compound), shapes, and colors, we created graphs and sorted the leaves according to their shape and the type of tree they came from.

In keeping with the season of harvesting and sharing good food, we are reading and comparing five versions of Stone Soup. With each edition, the group fills in a graphic organizer of the parts of a story: characters, setting, problem, and solution. After exploring the various versions of Stone Soup, kids will retell their own version of the classic tale. To celebrate our learning and the abundance of fall, we’ll bake an apple cake for our Harvest Feast, using math to calculate recipes and servings. It’s a joyful blend of science, storytelling, and seasonal celebration!

Bluebirds and Cardinals(7, 8, 9, 10, 11s)

Carriage House Harvest Projects

For our main Harvest Project this year, the Upper and Lower Carriage House worked together, choosing from one of the following: Indigenous Dwellings, Harvesting Colors: Natural Dyes, Harvest Feast Baking and a Harvest Edition of The Beak Jr. Magazine. No matter which they chose, they were exposed to the majority of our learning links. We shared with students what each project would entail and then they were able to use rank choice voting to make their selection.

Indigenous Dwellings with Angie

Students involved in this project are exploring the relationship that native peoples of the Northeast had with the land hundreds of years ago. Since indigenous cultures are very vast, we started out by identifying what we already know about it, and what we hope to learn.

Here at Randolph, indigenous teachings and history are woven throughout our curriculum, so our “what we know” list came together quickly: children discussed the Three Sisters, the Lenape people, the Wappinger people, and some kids offered up knowledge they had about building natural shelters. Then, they really dug deep as they pondered what they didn’t know: When did the first people arrive here? What were they called? Are they still around today? What did their villages look like? How did they cook? What materials and tools did they use to build a home? All of these questions and more have been guiding our work, whether it be through books, stories, pictures, hands-on building, or snippets of knowledge from evan, who has been assisting with this project alongside Angie.

A key focus of this project is the wigwam – a small, dome-shaped home that was commonly used by several indigenous cultures in the Northeast to house the immediate family. These shelters were built with flexible sapling frames and covered with bark, hides, or woven cattail mats. Our project has centered around creating both small-scale model wigwams and a large, life-size wigwam that will serve as a sheltered outdoor learning space once complete.

We began by taking a walk around the school, taking note of what the land had to offer us for this project. We looked for a suitable place to build our large model wigwam, and places to harvest materials. When deciding on a site, we discussed how the structure might impact our current community, how it would sit among the modern buildings, and how we wanted the space to “feel”. One factor that was important to the group was that it felt protected and tucked under a grove of large trees.

On our walk, we identified a grove of Ailanthus (Tree of Heaven) saplings that were the perfect size and flexible enough to be used for the frame of our wigwam. We discussed how using this invasive plant is a sustainable harvesting option, as opposed to cutting down native saplings. The saplings’ long, flexible petioles (small branches) were perfect for our smaller models. Angie and evan bent the trees down to kid-height so they could pluck off the leafless petioles. After harvesting just the right amount – not too few and not too many – we stored them in water to retain their flexibility.

Now we are ready to begin making our small model wigwams! The crew worked in two teams of 3-4 kids, using an instructions sheet to guide them through the steps. We used a stake in the center, twine, and a marker to create the circumference of the base of the wigwam, being careful to measure the appropriate diameter with the length of the twine. Each child got a chance to poke in a pole or two along that circle: a pair of poles at the North, South, East, and West ends of the wigwam. Opposite poles were bent towards each other and lashed together to form an arc. Additional longitudinal poles were staked in along the circle, and bent over to create smaller arcs that began forming the dome shape.

Johan prepping the hole.

Eddie, Charlie, and Savion sticking the pole in.

Zoe and Angie setting up the ladder.

Savion showing off his knot tying skills.

Showing Off Our Natural Dyed Yarn-Wrapped Napkin Rings!

Harvesting Colors: Natural Dyes with Renée

The Harvesting Colors Natural Dye project from last year is back by popular demand from some of the Carriage House elders who loved it last year and some new Carriage House friends who heard about it and were eager to give natural dyeing a try! The beauty of this year’s iteration of our Harvesting Color project is the knowledge and expertise of the elders who did this work with me last fall. They truly remember a lot from that time! Throughout our work the elders have been generously, clearly, and patiently sharing their knowledge with our first year Carriage House friends, including teaching them all how to knit! And, our new fiber artists have been eagerly soaking it all up, like a hank of wool yarn dunked into a marigold dye bath!

Like last year, we got our work started with an exploration of yarn and textiles, and the different kinds of fibers they’re made of. We learned (and remembered) that yarns are usually made up of three different types of fibers, not the kind of fiber you eat, but thread-like substances that can then be spun together using different kinds of spindles or spinning wheels. These fibers can be cellulose (plant-based like cotton or linen), protein (animal-based like wool or mohair), and synthetic (human-made like acrylic or spandex). We took a closer look at those three kinds of fibers in their raw, spun, knit, and woven forms under the microscope. The fiber artists did some highly detailed observational drawings, noticing things like the protein fibers kind of looked a little like wavy human hair (makes sense!), the cellulose fibers were duller, and the synthetic fibers looked like plastic (because it is!). We also got a chance to try out carding (kinda like brushing the fibers) and spinning our own yarn using a drop spindle. It’s hard work and really makes you appreciate the yarn we love using so much!

To start this project we had an initial discussion about what we wanted to dye (Yarn? Fabric? BOTH!?) and what to do with our colorful fibers once we’re finished. There were a lot of fun, clever ideas and much reminiscing about last year’s Grandmother Maple scarf project. In the end, we all decided that we wanted to make something for both Harvest Feast AND for Grandmother Maple. We landed on the very sweet idea of making cloth napkins and yarn napkin rings for everyone to use at Harvest Feast. Then the fiber artists’ plan is to wash the napkins after the feast and use them to sew a quilt for Grandmother Maple to snuggle under during her winter dormancy.

Next, the wool yarn (protein fiber) and cotton napkins (cellulose fiber) needed to be prepared for the dyeing process. Our elders taught the newbies how to use a special tool called an umbrella swift to make hanks of yarn, or large loops of yarn tied together. Around here we sometimes call them “yarn donuts.” The children learned (and remembered) that hanking the yarn helps to increase the surface area and keep the yarn from getting tangled during the dyeing process. We also made hanks in pairs, one partner holding their hands out while the other wrapped yarn around them; and independently by wrapping around their arm, like winding rope, or around the back of a chair. Some friends got creative making very large hanks by partnering up with one person wrapping yarn from head to toe on the other! Our napkins are simply woven bandanas that we cut into quarters. It was so fun and satisfying snipping one end and ripping along the grain of the cloth to get the size napkins we want.

Then it was time to scour and mordant! Scouring is like a special bath that clears away any oils or debris that would interfere with the dye penetrating the fibers. Protein and cellulose fibers have slightly different scouring and mordanting processes. The cotton needed to be scoured a couple times and it surprised even our elders how dirty the water was after scouring what looked like perfectly clean, white napkins! Once our yarn and napkins were nice and clean from scouring, they were ready for mordant. The children learned (and a couple even remembered!) that the word mordant comes from a Latin word that means “to bite” and is a chemical put on fibers that helps to attach and hold dye pigments to the fibers. This time around our elders were interested in experimenting with different types of mordants and no mordants at all to see what different colors would reveal themselves.

Harvest Feast Baking with Jackie

Though baking is a lot of fun, it is also a LOT of math! Especially when you are feeding a LOT of people (100 to be exact!) The baking team first had to find out how many people in total we were preparing food for. We looked at the class lists and added up the number of students and staff. Once that was done, we searched for recipes that would use the foods we harvested from our gardens. They decided on corn muffins, apple muffins, and butternut squash soup. After the recipes were selected, the big math began! How many times would we need to multiply each recipe? How much of each ingredient will we need? Kiddos added and multiplied their way through whole numbers AND fractions!

Time to Shop

After our ingredients were figured out, it was time to go to the grocery store! With the help of Amy and Tisha, students in this group took a trip to Adam’s Fairacre Farms to shop for our remaining supplies. Each child in this group had their own shopping list that they were responsible for keeping track of, making sure we didn’t miss any of our ingredients. Together, they compared prices of items, looking for the lowest prices as they went. They also looked for any of the items that were on sale from the store circular they had looked through prior to our trip to the store. Our outing concluded with a fun “impulse buy” of some flavored popcorn to bring back to share with the rest of our friends in the Carriage House! (A major highlight of the trip, if you ask any of the kiddos that went!)

Once we had all of our supplies, the food preparations began! Because we were making such large quantities of food, we knew we needed to get a jump start on it, even though Harvest Feast was still several weeks away when we started. Part of the process of selecting the recipes was that they needed to be foods that would freeze well. Kiddos chopped butternut squash, potatoes, apples, carrots and the “dreaded” onions (We all know that many tears were shed during that process! A special THANK YOU to Chloe’s mom, Eve, for her soup recipe!) They measured and mixed dry and wet muffin ingredients, and scooped out over 300 mini muffins! There may have been some taste testing along the way. After all, a good chef/baker always makes sure they are happy with their product they are putting out to the public, right?!

Harvest Edition of The Beak Jr. Magazine with Lewis

This group is carrying the torch set down by the Woodpeckers, producing an edition of The Beak Jr. magazine that celebrates all the ways in which Harvest season is experienced at Randolph, and beyond! Each article is an example of a Carriage house student doing creative literacy work within constraints - finding ways to express themselves while creating content that makes connections between our seasonal theme, our learning links, and themselves.

Each session begins with a mini goal setting exercise, as each columnist notes the work time available and gives themselves an objective to accomplish. We conclude the work session by reflecting on our progress, noting if we met the goal, why, or why not. As I conference with each student throughout the work period, we discuss this process and hone their ability to prioritize and complete tasks.

Even when the product is as exciting as a magazine that will be shared out in the world, the process remains the true focus of this adventure in creative publishing. This is why doing critiques is such an important part of our work - true quality is achieved when the reader can learn something new, while enjoying the personality of the writer shining through each carefully drafted sentence and illustration. Our process is as follows:

Gather so that the work and author are visible and prominent
Introduce the piece
Ask the audience for feedback on a specific element
Write all feedback on post its or scribe directly on a copy of the work
Author takes critique copy and implements feedback, preparing the piece for a final edit

We include our professional mentor, Vivian, in these final stages. Vivian publishes About Town, a small paper that has reported on local history and advertised local businesses for the last 43 years. She provides us with brainstorming support in her email correspondences with our assistant editor, and helps us finalize The Beak Jr. so that she can proudly distribute it along side About Town.

Most importantly, we look forward to sharing fresh copies of The Beak Jr. Harvest edition among the table settings at our Harvest Feast next week, and watching our school community enjoy the fruits of our labor!

There is so much more to share about these integrated, student driven projects. Please click here to read the full post from the Carriage House teachers.

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