Bethany Coursen brings her pre-school and pre-kindergarten classes to Stonewall Farm every year. The Farm’s educational programs offer important lessons about the agriculture and nature – and the kids have fun.
BETHANY: So right now they’re using the bees to pollinate the pumpkin flowers down the path that leads from the great pumpkin. The kids each use the bee puppet to go from one pumpkin flower to the next pumpkin flower and kind of do the little dance inside the flowers to get the pollen all over the bees so they can go to the next flower and help create the fruit pods that they just learned all about from the great pumpkin.
They get to hear how she starts as a little seed and she talks about after she’s a seed she becomes a sprout and asks questions like what the seeds need to grow and the kids get to answer all their questions about the sun and water. She talks about her awkward stage when she’s a fruit pod and they get to laugh and giggle about that and then they see how it turns into this big orange pumpkin that they see at the farm stands or in their own yards. They talk about what they can do with the pumpkins and the things they can make.
The job that Stonewall Farms is doing here - teaching our children a love for nature in a fun way - it’s just building a great foundation for these kids to understand that you need sun and you need healthy soil and you need bees to make things grow that we need.