A sustainable Thanksgiving
If you were a vegetable what would you be? “I’d be an avocado because, it’s creamy,” said 6-year-old Max Freedman, a first-grader at Mount Madonna School. The school’s first- and second-grade students prepared for their Harvest Feast, and teachers Carol and Stan Rentschler took them on a journey from the farm to the kitchen and finally the compost bucket.
Teacher Carol Rentschler said the students had a waste-free Thanksgiving feast, demonstrating to students what happens after the big feast.
The sustainable Thanksgiving feast’s menu consisted of water, vegetable soup, whole wheat drop biscuits, organic apple slices and local honey.
Preparations started Monday, when the students traveled to an organic family farm in Hollister to harvest vegetables to use in preparing Wednesday’s soup. The class grinded organic wheat for biscuit flour, and parents sent their child to school with a spoon, cup, bowl and cloth napkin. The kids washed their utensils after the meal and fed their food scraps to the worms.
The husband-wife teaching team have dedicated time in the curriculum for teaching “green” and educating eco-smart kids. Mount Madonna School is the first pre-K-12-grade school to participate in the Waste Free Schools Program (a program of Santa Cruz County’s Resource Conservation Program). Elementary classes were recently visited by “The Worm Doctor,” Karin Grobe, a vermi-composting expert and guest expert Orli Loewenberg, manager of Santa Cruz’s Life Lab Science program, who talked with students about “Zero Waste Lunches” and led them through an examination of their lunchboxes to see what they could reuse, compost and what would become waste.
The students’ ongoing eco-education includes weekly classes in the half-acre organic school garden and December visits to the Buena Vista Landfill and Castroville Recycling Plant to see the scale of the waste problem in their community.
Open house at Monte Vista Christian School
Students and their families are invited to investigate Monte Vista Christian School in Watsonville at an open house 1:30-3:30 p.m., Dec. 2.
Visitors can meet teachers, examine curriculum and tour the 100-acre campus. Tours leave every 30 minutes, and the last tour is at 3 p.m.
Monte Vista Christian School serves grades 6-12, with an enrollment of about 800 and an average class size of about 20. Electives offered include choir, drama, orchestra, photography, culinary arts, digital video production, auto shop, plus a variety of honors and Advanced Placement courses.
