Year 3 visit Smite Farm

Children in Year 3 at King's St. Alban's Junior School travelled to Lower Smite Farm as part of their work on Healthy Eating. An earlier visit to school by Judith Davies, a local Dental Hygienist, had started the children thinking about what they eat. At Lower Smite Farm the children visited fields learning how the cereal crops were grown and harvested, leaving a strip unploughed at the field edges for the birds to enjoy. In the middle of another field a large patch of sunflowers reached for the sky, planted to feed the birds and provide a habitat for beneficial insects, such as butterflies, which were spotted sunbathing on the seed heads. On the way across the fields the children picked and sampled blackberries and sloes from the hedgerow.

 The pupils, aged between seven and eight, picked ears of wheat and carefully carried their precious cargo back to the old threshing barn. Class teacher Rachel Duke challenged them to grind their wheat with large round stones to see how much flour they could produce. Her colleague, Fleur Dolphin said, "The children worked really hard for five minutes and managed to collect about 10grams of flour between them. It wasn't quite enough for us to make bread, so it was lucky that the friendly staff at the farm had been out to buy some flour that morning." All the children enjoyed kneading their dough before baking and later tasting their bread.

A trip to the farm's vegetable patch yielded a bowl of the tiniest, sweetest, cherry red tomatoes. Rachel Duke was surprised how well the children managed to resist eating them as they were picked but all of the jewel like harvest was needed to make soup, a joint effort back in the farm's kitchen. Next was a trip to the herb garden, a smelly sensation of liquorice allsorts (fennel) and chewing gum (mint), rosemary and thyme. All went in to our cooking pot.

"2007 is the Year of Food and Farming and our Year 3 children had a fantastic day of discovery, learning about the journey their food takes from field to fork" concluded Rachel Duke. "The facilities at the Worcestershire Wildlife Trust owned Lower Smite Farm were excellent. We look forward to going again."