Community Soup

It’s spring! At this time of year, I like to do a unit on fruits and vegetables, gardens and making soup with my kindergarteners that works with a garden project they do in their classrooms. It coincides perfectly with our Empty Bowls event, a fundraiser and community dinner. This year, with my newcomers, we started by looking at fruits and vegetables, naming them, sorting them based on colors, and listening for initial sounds. We played fruits and vegetables Bingo, and “Hot Potato,” passing plastic veggies around the room until the music stopped and the student holding the toy had to tell what it was and it’s color. We read a few different books about making soup, to practice reading sight words and to set the context.

These included Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert, Community Soup by Alma Fullerton, and the Fountas & Pinnell leveled reader Making Soup.  We practiced making soup with playdough, forming different vegetables we wanted in our soup and cutting them up and putting them in color pots. Finally, we started our real soup prep, my students helped me peel the carrots and sweet potatoes, chop the vegetables with plastic knives, and press garlic and ginger. We used the recipe at the back of Community Soup as our guide. We smelled the different spices and herbs that would season our soup: cinnamon, parsley and basil. The students scrunched their noses at the garlic and ginger, but once we had it all simmering in the pot they couldn’t wait to try it.

They took turns adding handfuls of veggies to the warm pot, then pouring in the broth, and stirring. After our soup cooked for a while, I blended it all with a hand blender and we poured in coconut milk.  This creamy, flavorful soup was one of the best I’ve ever tasted, especially since it was made by our classroom community. The students who wanted to try it took a bit home in a coffee cup, but the rest was donated to the Empty Bowls dinner, and at parent teacher conferences beforehand I encouraged my students’ families to come and enjoy the soup their children had made.
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This week, we're putting pictures of this process in order and creating a classroom book on how to make soup. They are helping to tell what we did and write the text. Then, we'll read it together and students can make their own books to read and share with their classmates. The kindergarten classes are also doing a project where students must create a "how to" book and so this work supports success in their mainstream classrooms.