Every year, the fourth grade at LCWS gets to finish off their first Local Geography block with a Pioneer Overnight at New Village Farm. When they returned from their trip, they were tasked to draw their favorite part.
“My Favorite Experience at New Village Farm was making fires and cooking on them. To make the fire, we used ferronium rods, a type of flint and steel.”
The class walked over to the farm on Wednesday afternoon, and after setting up their bedrolls and sleeping bags they set to work on various tasks related to the evening meal. Children washed and chopped vegetables they had harvested the day before in the fields, while others mixed up cornbread, peeled and chopped apples, and used flint and steel to make sparks in dry grasses to start a cooking fire.
Chopping wood was a favorite activity that carried on into twilight, and our candlelight feast of soups, cornbread, and apple crisp was washed down with cider pressed by the students the previous day.
There was a merry game of Dark Vision tag, and then farmer Michaela played a pioneer memory game to settle everyone into bed in the greenhouse.
Dark Vision Tag
“One of my friends started to play tag at night and then everybody started to come in and if you want to play it it’s super fun it just needs to be dark and if the tagger tags someone, then the first tagger is not the tagger but the one who got tagged is now it.”
Coyotes sang all night, the moon shone, and still, a lot of us slept well!
“Listening to the wolf howl was very peaceful”
My Favorite Time at NVF
“I was at nvf, it was soo cold and I felt homesick so my friends came next to me and we fell asleep. P.S. We are in the greenhouse.”
In the morning we had eggs gathered from the chickens, oatmeal cooked on the stove, stewed apples, and raw goat milk.
After some more chores, we headed back to school, with a new sense of the hard work and beauty of the pioneer life!