By Stephen Smoot
The farm to table movement has settled into the education plans at local elementary schools. Students in Rebecca Heavner’s fourth-grade class at North Fork Elementary School enjoyed an especially sweet experience with hands on lessons about maple.
“It was really cool that I could work with the fourth graders at NFES,” said Melissa Grimes. She and her husband, Chris, jointly operate the veterans’ non profit Mountain Cajun Getaways. Part of the financial support for their organization, as well as their programs for vets, comes from maple produced on their own property.
To the retired teacher Grimes, stepping back into a teaching role was only natural. She started this past spring during maple season. Also “I live right across the street from the school, which makes it easy,” she commented. Material support for the project came from Future Generations University, who “gave us the buckets and everything we’d need.”
FGU has supported maple education, production, and sales locally in recent years.
Students learned how to tap the trees first, getting to help empty the buckets until they reached a total of 25 gallons. The next week “we started evaporating” in a device that Grimes said resembled a “Fry Daddy.”
It took three days to evaporate the 25 gallons of maple water. Then students participated in the bottling process and got to take home their own eight-ounce container. “They even made their own labels on their bottles to take home,” Grimes explained.
The rest of the product Grimes donated to the school to sell as a fundraiser.
What did the students do with their syrup? Grimes said most admitted that they hid their syrup so that their siblings couldn’t get into it. “They treasured the final product so much. They didn’t want it all gone in one sitting.”
“Some of them said they wanted to make their own syrup when they get older,” she added.
Syrup production does not just educate children on how to make a final product. They learned marketing by designing their own labels, science as they heard explanations of why 25 gallons of maple water only makes a half gallon of syrup, and more. The entire program, Grimes said produced “lasting knowledge” and “lasting memories.”
Other elementary schools have embarked on their own projects. Becky Rightsell’s sixth-grade class tends a futuristic tower garden in their classroom, raising vegetables that they also get to eat. Mahala Ruddle, a first-grade teacher at Franklin Elementary, has started a program to use hands on techniques to teach children about poultry.
Additionally, Pendleton County Middle/High School’s Future Farmers of America operate their own greenhouse as a business, using proceeds from sales to help pay for programs and educational trips.
“You learn so much more in getting your hands on what you’re doing,” Grimes explained, adding that the experience is “much more positive than reading a paragraph and answering questions.”
