Our culminating class was a celebration of the neighborhood where our students go to school, the Castro. We started off by reading the book Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag written by Rob Sanders and illustrated by Steven Salerno. Thursday’s class got a special treat when Mr. Michael Hampton, one of our amazing community volunteers at HMCRA, read the book to the class and added stories from his own experience living in the Castro during the 1970s when most of the events in the book occurred. The students were so excited to find out that Michael knew Harvey Milk and met Gilbert Baker, the original designer of the flag, and that he actually took part in the marches and protests depicted in the book.
We then created our own tribute to the rainbow flag by constructing a parfait using watermelon to represent red; oranges and orange zest to represent orange; bananas, lemon zest, and marigold petals to represent yellow; kiwis and lime zest to represent green; blueberries to represent blue; and Autumn Royal grapes and pansies to represent purple. All the fruit and edible flowers came from local farms and gave our young chefs plenty of opportunity to display their pro knife skills. We layered the fruit in champagne flutes with hand-whipped cream and garnished the parfaits with spearmint from our own school garden!
On Tuesday, Ms. Butler, who runs a website called Gender Inclusive Classrooms, was our special staff guest and answered student questions and helped us understand the difference between the terms sex, gender, and sexuality. Thank you to Mr. Michael, Ms. Butler, Ms. Laurence, and Ms. Reynolds for visiting and to all of our students and their families for getting to school so early these past seven weeks so that The Breakfast Project can be a vibrant place to learn and share a meal together. See you all again soon!
