Farm to School
Pre-school - Grade 5
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Our educators seek to deepen knowledge about nourishing foods with students, faculty, and families. We emphasize local, healthy, mindful eating in more than 1,000 students per month. Lessons are delivered in person to Preschool to Grade 5 classrooms. Common Roots has also produced seasonal video lessons...available at the bottom of PAGE.
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EACH episode is accompanied by multi-disciplinary lessons for ages 4 through adults including sections with pre-natal and elders content.
Students who go to middle school have received
54 explicit lessons and taste tests from Common Roots.
To date we have taught over 140,000 individual lessons.
Episode 1:
Apples Through the Seasons
Most Vermonters can tell you a story or two about the wonderful apple harvest traditions they have experienced. In this lesson we take a sensory walk through an apple orchard to learn about the hard work apple orchardists do each year to create a bountiful harvest in the fall.
We also explore the health and wellness benefits apples provide our bodies while we learn some of the best ways to get a big serving of Vitamin V for vitality. After that we take a trip through history and figure out how apples started to grow all across the United States. Finally, in our Digging Deeper section of this lesson we focus on reciprocity and consider how we might give back to our community during the fall harvest time.
Episode 2:
Winter Squash and Abenaki Foodways
With gratitude for the Abenaki agricultural traditions our second video about squash celebrates the gifts of today and yesterday. Journey with Farmer Fae into the fall harvest on the farm, discover the Seven Sisters, and enjoy a culinary lesson with Abenaki Chef Jesse and our own Chef Zack.
Learn how to carry on the tradition of seed saving and be surprised to learn that familiar squashes on our dinner table have been tended by the Abenaki for ten thousand years. Curriculum wellness support written for ages 4-7, 8-12, teen to adult, pre-natal, and elders is available and invites you on a deeper journey into how to cultivate a community that caretakes our soil and ourselves.
Episode 3: Microgreens and Worm Composting How To
Restoring Ourselves, Our Soil, and Sprouting Microgreens scratches the surface of soil, the heart of our continuing food journey through the year. Winter’s hush across the landscape inspires restorative immune support practices boosted by the amazing support of microgreens, holders of sunshine and deep nutrition. Follow along using our demos on composting food waste with earthworms, sprouting and making microgreen confetti recipes, and microgreen yoga.
Episode 4:
Fermenting Cabbage
In our Common Roots Fermenting Cabbage video you will learn some basics about an age old food preservation process called fermentation - a cooking process that does not require a stovetop. Get ready for a step by step demonstration about souring cabbage into sauerkraut. This video dives into gut health and how our body’s microbiome relates to the soil microbiome. You will also learn about some communities that have been eating and preserving fermented foods - including how sauerkraut saved sailors lives. Join us for a sea shanty sing along to get you up and moving! Our free curriculum expands far beyond these beginning topics.
Episode 5:
Maple Sugaring
This video filmed in a fourth-generation 100-year-old sugarhouse dips into the mystery of the rising sap at a traditional celebratory boil during a Vermont Maple Moon sugaring season. The first wild tonic of late winter and early spring was initiated long ago by the Abenaki women who passed along to settlers the practice of gleaning nourishment from the forest. Learn which trees to tap, stretch out with some maple-inspired yoga, and follow along in the kitchen to create a culinary delight with mineral-rich maple syrup that rounds out this timeless forest adventure. May this 30-minute sugaring season video fill you with gratitude for the sweet sap of renewal gifted to us again and again as the quiet hush of the winter forest fades into spring.
