Harvest Feast
November 17, 2023
A Feast for Our Whole Community
On Friday, November 17th we celebrated our Harvest Feast. Our community feast has adapted and changed over the years. Our gardens have expanded, our commitment to learning about Indigenous communities and their farming practices has developed and our shift to an outdoor model has helped us embrace the challenges of cooking over an open fire. Preparations for this feast have been months in the making and link us back to last spring when we planted our crops.
This week the campus has been transformed as each group has embraced different aspects of the process to help create a feast for our entire student community. Indigenous storyteller Evan Pritchard joined us to share some stories about Sister Corn and Frost Boy. He also shared a Thanksgiving Address written in the Wappinger language.
The menu was extensive and represented the best that our Randolph gardens had to offer. There were garlic mashed potatoes, freshly pressed apple cider, egg custards with eggs from our very own chickens, foraged herbal tea blends, 3 Sisters succotash and of course, Stone Soup. We filled our bellies and we also nourished our hearts and minds as we learned important lessons about teamwork, sharing and gratitude. The teachers were on hand to help children apply their academic knowledge as they doubled recipes, created shopping budgets and calculated place settings. Harvest Feast is the perfect example of what learning is all about at Randolph School. We provide real world opportunities to apply the things we learn. This is why we learn math strategies and phonics skills so we are able to accurately scale a recipe and write a menu for our community. Each year before we eat we read a list created by the students giving thanks to the things they deem important.
This is what our children generated this year:
The creek
The chickens and their eggs
The 3 Sisters
The spiral
Apple trees at Randolph
The food we prepared for this feast
Adams for our Stone Soup
Randy and Lavender(Roosters that left Randolph)
Our maple trees
Indoor & outdoor spaces to learn in
Learning from nature
Medicinal plants
The playground
Our class names
Our traditions
Sharing food together
Having friends
Celebrating celebrations
Everything!
For being alive
Everyone for being everyone!
For the Links Teachers and
All of the teachers who take care of us
The Wappinger People, who took care of the land we love before it was Randolph
Please take some time to see the ways that each group spent their time preparing for our feast. We have a lot to be grateful for.
Inside(and Outside) of the Studio with Nina
Embroidery and Decorations
Decorating tables for Harvest Feast is always a beautiful part of this tradition and a wonderful opportunity to link all of our groups together. This year, each child, from our youngest to oldest, has worked together to create beautiful sewn table runners. Each child chose to use embroidery, paint pens, and/or fabric markers to create their own special square. In addition to our sewn and colored squares, we experimented with using our gelli plates and fabric paint to create leaf monoprints to be sewn into the table runners. The Wolf Spiders took on a leadership role in this. They helped assist in the studio with different ages, and they helped sew our quilting squares together on the sewing machine.
In addition, this is the first year when we’re using some of the beautiful ceramic plates our elders made last year as part of our Harvest Feast. They’re being used as part of our offering table and as serving dishes. We’re looking forward to making more plates and dishes for future Harvest Feasts this spring.
Back in the Stacks with Siobhan
Celebrating Indigenous Authors
This week at Randolph we are preparing for Harvest Feast and we are also reading lots of books! In the library, we are reading books by Indigenous authors. In the amphitheater, we are reading many different versions of the Stone Soup folktale. In the studio, we are reading books about sewing (sometimes while we are sewing!).
We are reading solo and in groups. We are reading with grown-ups and with friends. Reading books helps us contextualize the experiences and conversations we are having around Harvest Feast. And is one of the many ways we celebrate reading and a love of books and learning throughout the year.
Notes from the Field with evan and Amy
The Stories that Guide Us
Our Harvest Feast offers us so many opportunities to learn as a community about where our food comes from, the history of the land we are on, and what it means to be a member of a community.
This year, we used two stories to help us explore these important themes with all of the children at Randolph School. Each group had a chance to hear versions of the 3 Sister origin story from the Oneida Nation and Stone Soup. The children acted out the stories and created 3 Sisters inspired nature art. They compared multiple versions of a text while discussing theme and main ideas.
There is a lot of work that goes into preparing a feast. it took every person contributing what they could to make this year's Harvest Feast a success.
Stone Soup Market
This year a group of the Wolf Spiders took the lead on the marketing for our Stone Soup. Every year as we learn about the story we also create our own Randolph Version. We open a Stone Soup Market where each group picks a vegetable to prepare for our soup. We met together as a food committee and made a shopping lists based on the recipes chosen by each group.
We researched prices using the Adam's Fairacre Farms website. Once we had prices, we did the math to figure our how much we would need to spend. Adam's generously agreed to supply us with a $150 gift card, which completely covered our costs. Finally, the Wolf Spiders joined me at Adam's to shop for our ingredients.
The Bug Bunch (Downstairs: 3s, 4s, 5s)
Applesauce
Bringing boxes of apples back to school from the 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 were able to eat and enjoy as well as share with their peers and older friends helped foster a sense of pride and community.
The Birds, Ladybugs and Field Mice(Upstairs Neighborhood: 5s, 6s, 7s)
Egg Custard Pie and 3 Sisters Succotash
The Upstairs Neighborhood prepared three food offerings for this year’s feast: Three Sisters Succotash, roasted pumpkin seeds and an egg custard pie using magical Randolph chicken eggs, from the hens they’ve been taking such good care of! We also were in charge of counting plates and cutlery, and setting the tables the morning of the feast.
Eagles(Carriage House: 7s,8s,9s)
Corn Muffins
It’s that time of the year again! How have we made it to Harvest Feast so quickly?! The Eagles, along with all of Randolph School were busy this week scurrying around preparing for our special event! With Harvest Feast comes a special meal shared amongst friends, young and old. But Harvest Feast also brings along some very important math! How many people are we cooking for? What is the quantity of an item that one recipe produces? How many times do we need to multiply this recipe by in order to feed all these people? What is each ingredient quantity once we multiply it? So many important questions!
The Eagles began their preparations by first brainstorming a list of food items that we could potentially make for the feast. We were given a list of items that were harvested from our gardens this year. Knowing those ingredients, we brainstormed quite an abundant list! In the end, we settled on making mini corn muffins and garlic butter.
First, we had to figure out how many people we would be preparing food for. Eagles worked together using the school directory to count up how many students are in each cohort. Then they had to also figure out how many staff members we have. The grand total came out to 104 people! We talked about rounding and accounting for anyone we may have accidentally left out, so The Eagles decided we need to bake 110 mini muffins.
From there we looked at a recipe that prepares 40 muffins per batch. We used repeated addition along with multiplication to then decide we need to make 3 batches of mini muffins for a grand total of 120 muffins. Interestingly, some Eagles saw that number as “a problem” because it wasn’t the exact number. This led to an important conversation around math and how if we have extra is it a problem? Or would it be a problem if we were short some? They quickly realized because we were making enough, it isn’t a problem after all. Our Eagles, being the big thinkers that they are, posed the question, “What do we do with the 10 leftover muffins? There isn’t enough for everyone to have seconds.” It didn’t take long before someone suggested…the chickens! The chickens would sure love a tasty treat on Harvest Feast as well. After all, they are a part of our school too!
Wolf Spiders(Carriage House: 9s,10s,11s)
Our Elders Take the Lead
The Wolf Spiders are really proud of their contributions to Harvest Feast this year. As the oldest kids in our community, they stepped up to plan different parts of the day, supported younger groups with their contributions, and started new traditions like creating tea blends for the feast.
They also made activity sheets for kids to do when the feast was over, chopped tons and tons of wood for cooking fires, and made and hung a welcome banner. A group of kids also worked with evan to conceptualize, plan, and create a napkin holder for each person to use at the feast. Check out some of the happenings of the last few weeks!
This year's feast is behind us. As we were all celebrating together on the backfield the seeds that we gathered from our plants this year were waiting patiently for the time when they can germinate and grow into a feast for next year. They cycle continues.