What a gift to be able to work with the kindergarteners in the outdoors after a year of Edible Social Studies via Zoom with grades 1-5! Over the month of May, we will be exploring what healthy bodies and healthy communities need to thrive. Each week we’ll learn a simple idea that we’ll carry with us as we build on our knowledge all the way into fifth grade. Our first class started with introductions. Every kindergarten chef shared their name and their favorite color. Many chefs have multiple favorite colors, and I loved how some students included metallic colors like gold and silver.
Next, we opened up our kits and discovered a rainbow fruit salad to help remind us that eating the rainbow, a variety of brightly colored fruits and vegetables, makes our bodies strong. Surrounding ourselves with a diversity of people also makes our families, schools, and neighborhoods strong.
Normally students would be in the school kitchen preparing the fruit salad themselves, but the modifications we need to make this year give them more time to enjoy the food and also allowed time for some live music. We read Lois Ehlert’s book Planting a Rainbow, which has beautiful illustrations of many colorful plants, including several that share the same name as some of our kindergarteners! Then we sang a song about the colors of the rainbow set to an old Appalachian folk tune. The ukulele was a big draw, so I’ll be sure to bring it back next week so we can sing more songs together at the park.
This year’s rainbow salad featured strawberries, Gold Nugget mandarins, mangoes, kiwis, blueberries, and blackberries, but as we’ll learn over the course of the unit, we can change the ingredients with the changing of the seasons. All deeply colored plants provide us with phytonutrients that help us grow. For those of you who would like to recreate the recipe at home, it’s posted below. Our suggestions are to wait until the fruit is ripe for maximum flavor, and to let kindergarteners practice cutting on their own. A crinkle cutter (think potatoes turned into Ruffles potato chips) is a particularly great culinary tool for this age group and works well on soft foods like fruit.
