The Upper Unit enjoyed a warm summer night taking in Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night. Upper Elementary students read and discussed an adaptation of the play before going. Middle School students did a dramatic reading of the play in class, using a manga-illustrated version of the play with Shakespeare’s exact dialogue.

The high school students have been talking about the relationship between food and memory. “Food memories involve very basic, nonverbal, areas of the brain that can bypass your conscious awareness,” writes Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in an article for the BBC. “This is why you can have strong emotional reactions when you eat a food that arouses those deep unconscious memories. You can’t put those memories into words, but you know there is ‘something’ that the food triggers deep within your past. The memory goes beyond the food itself to the associations you have to that long-ago memory, whether with a place or a person.”

With this concept in mind, we challenged our students to think of a person in their lives that they want to remember, to identify a “signature dish” that that person liked to make or eat, and to prepare the dish in that person’s honor. In this way, the students were able to excavate their memories of a special person through the sensory experience of cooking.

These dishes were presented at the Back-to-school Picnic to the delight of all.

Every year, the Primary classroom makes a healthy trail mix as a treat for the entire school. Older kids love to see them coming, remembering how delicious it is and many remember when they themselves used to make and bring trail mix around the school.

During morning meetings, Primary students talk about what they’re making and how to be careful to consider what other students can’t eat. Each student comes to the mixing bowl to add a healthy pour of an ingredient. By serving the trail mix in every classroom and the office, Primary students learn where everyone is during the day and that every space is a friendly place. Learning to serve others first before ourselves requires patience and self-regulation. Of course, the chefs get to eat some of their snack when they return to their classroom.