Most Aroostook County schools no longer release elementary school students in the fall to help harvest potatoes, but Maine Agri-Women are going into the classroom to help ensure they still know the significance of agriculture in their lives.
Members of the statewide organization, founded in Aroostook County in 1992 to promote agricultural awareness, are taking their personal stories and those of others into pre-kindergarten through fourth-grade classrooms across The County.
As part of Read “ME” Agriculture week, March 21-25, Maine Agri-Women volunteers will read to students from a new book about Maine potatoes produced by Augusta-based Maine Agriculture in the Classroom.
Titled “Potatoes for ME,” the book is illustrated with pictures of Aroostook County farms and comes with an activity guide including reproducible games, puzzles and other activities for grades K-4. Volunteer readers also will tell students about their own farms and what they grow.
“Funding for this project is a direct result of the Maine agricultural specialty license plate, grants from the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry, and collaboration this year with the Maine Potato Board,” states an online invitation for teachers to sign up for the program. “Read ME Agriculture has been a very successful program since 2008, reaching over 74,000 Maine students.”
Maine Agri-Women also honored “Potato Lovers Month” in February by launching a series of visits to fourth-grade classrooms by Maine Agri-Women member and author Lynn Olsen Brown, who uses her book “Alice, Frankenstein and Saturday Night Beans” to educate fourth-graders on traditional hand harvesting of potatoes.
“We are trying to keep harvest alive,” said Nancy Wright, a Maine Agri-Women member from Littleton. “Kids love the presentations. It is hard to get out (of the classroom) in an hour, they have so many questions.”
Maine Agri-Women approached Brown to help them reach fourth-graders after reading a Bangor Daily News article about her presentation at Katahdin Elementary School last September.
The group obtained grants from the American Agri-Women Foundation board and Partners in the Arts to fund her visits, which are continuing as long as the money holds out. A donation from Machias Savings Bank is helping the group present a copy of Brown’s book to all fourth-grade classrooms in Aroostook County, and the Washburn 21st Century After School Program funded a presentation in Washburn.
A local member of Maine Agri-Women introduces Brown at each school, and the author then talks about her connection to farming and engages students in discussions of where food comes from, often correcting the notion that it comes from stores.
According to the group, Brown’s presentation focuses “specifically on her childhood memories of picking potatoes on the Bradford Farm,” referring to the Patten farm of Brown’s aunt Irene Bradford, whom she and her sister visited annually as children.
Brown reads some of her book to the children “to arouse students’ curiosity and also share the process of writing an autobiography.”
Each chapter of the book presents a different aspect of farm life in the 1950s and ’60s, and the author embellishes her presentation with a display of artifacts and clothing from the period.
In addition to introducing students to the culture of potato harvest as part of the area’s history, the project aims to foster a love of reading and writing.
“We hope they will be influenced in their writing,” Wright said, adding that Brown identifies examples of figurative language, such as metaphors and similes, as she reads from her book.
Wright recalled one student who asked Brown, “Did you really write that book?” When she said, “Yes,” the class responded, “Cool.”
Teachers Gretchen Fitzpatrick, Becky Reed and Teresa McNinch gathered their students at Southside School in Houlton for a speaker-phone conversation this week so the youngsters could tell me what they liked best about Brown’s recent presentation to them on potato picking.
“If you weren’t careful, little kids would take the ticket from your barrel and put theirs on (instead),” said Amelia, one of the students, referring to the way hand-pickers earned credit for the number of barrels picked.
“They had to wear layers,” recalled another. “The hotter and hotter it got, they had to take their layers off. And they had to cover their heads because of the dirt.”
Popular features of Brown’s presentation were Irene Bradford’s handwritten journals of day-to-day life on the farm, a painting of two girls reflected in a mirror symbolizing Brown and her sister as children, “real photos of things that went on” and her collection of farm and household items, including glass bottles that “we barely have any more.”
The students said they enjoyed hearing Brown read, and student Keira liked hearing “they ate junk food and burned off all the calories.”
Of the 35 fourth-graders in the group, 14 had experience picking potatoes, and several said they had aunts and uncles or grandparents who owned potato fields.
Brown visited schools in Houlton and Mars Hill in February, and has visits scheduled in coming weeks for Easton, Mapleton, Woodland, New Sweden, Washburn, Fort Fairfield, Hodgdon and Zippel School in Presque Isle.
“Loved this presentation!” wrote Janel Nelson, another Southside School teacher, on her evaluation of the presentation. “Makes me sad that most kids won’t have the experience of picking potatoes or harvest. I am in hopes we can make this a yearly presentation. Thanks to the Maine Agri-Women for putting this together.”
For information on “Potatoes for ME,” visit MaineAgintheClassroom.org. For information on classroom visits by Lynn Brown, call Judy Kenney (764-1787), Pam Townsend (429-9678) or Nancy Wright (538-9449).
Kathryn Olmstead is a former University of Maine associate dean and associate professor of journalism living in Aroostook County, where she publishes the quarterly magazine Echoes. Her column appears in this space every other Friday. She can be reached at kathryn.olmstead@umit.maine.edu or P.O. Box 626, Caribou, ME 04736.