Hands-On Exploration of Nature, Agriculture, and Community: HRA’s First Graders Visit the Virginia Beach Farmers Market

Within the four walls of a classroom, students can hear about where their food comes from and how members of their community produce it. But when students get outside and witness these processes first-hand, the lessons come alive, and young learners truly understand how their daily experience is linked to a wider world.

On Thursday, October 8, Hampton Roads Academy’s first-grade classes had the opportunity to engage in such vivid, hands-on learning about agriculture, nature, nutrition, and the regional community when they spent the day at the Virginia Beach Farmers Market.

The year-round marketplace, featuring a bakery, a creamery, seafood and butcher shops, and a host of other farm-related businesses, offers a wealth of educational programming that dovetails with the first-grade curriculum at HRA. Through interactive activities that allowed them to see, touch, and listen to stories about animals, plants, and farm life in the past and present, students applied and expanded upon their classroom coverage of science, social studies, math, English, and health. The first graders explored Virginia agriculture, discovered the connections among animals, plants, and food, and investigated how farmers and other hardworking professionals supply the goods that meet consumers’ wants and needs.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity for them to see how learning across different subject areas connects in the real world,” said first-grade teacher Kelley Rhodes—“all within an authentic community setting.”

“Excitement and Curiosity”: A Day Full of Interactive Learning

A field trip to the Virginia Beach Farmers Market has been a staple of the first-grade fall calendar for the past six years. As an educator who has engaged with statewide Agriculture in the Classroom programs for nearly a decade and a half, Rhodes is especially passionate about this tradition, which helps students connect more deeply with both their studies and the local community.

Each year, Rhodes and her fellow first-grade teachers, Staci Lanier and Kim Morgan, collaborate with the Rural Heritage Center to craft a Farmers Market experience full of enriching, hands-on activities.

Complementing the first-grade science curriculum, covering natural resources and basic plant structures and life cycles, students visited the Children’s Garden, planted seeds, investigated composting worms, and had the chance to observe honeybees and chickens. Through crafts and stories delivered by program facilitators, the first graders gained a deeper appreciation for the contributions of pollinators, the significance of natural resources, and the ways in which plants become the foods they eat, in turn helping them understand how to make nutritionally sound dietary choices.

These lessons, according to Morgan, “gave the children opportunities to explore nature and learn about the important roles that insects, animals, plants, and the Earth play in our everyday lives.”

The Farmers Market visit was an equally valuable complement to first-grade social studies. In their classes, students learn about communities, occupations, geography, and such economic concepts as goods and services and the relationship between producers and consumers. By meeting farmers and exploring the work they do in the field, in their homes, and in the marketplace, students witnessed a tangible illustration of all of these concepts in action.

The first graders also had the opportunity to discover farm life first-hand by milking a life-sized model cow and trying out historical agricultural tasks, such as pumping water and grinding corn into cornmeal by hand, washing clothing with a traditional washboard and tub, and churning cream into butter.

“These activities allowed them to experience how people lived and worked in the past while developing a greater appreciation for where the things they use every day come from,” Morgan said. “What I enjoy most is seeing the excitement and curiosity the children have as they explore.”

Along the way, students practiced math skills as they counted and packaged eggs and sorted and weighed vegetables at a farm stand, applying their number sense and measurement abilities to practical scenarios. They even utilized crucial language and communication skills, from speaking and listening to vocabulary development, as they observed program facilitators’ presentations and asked questions to advance their learning.

The field trip reinforced not only classroom curricula, but also a range of hands-on experiences on HRA’s campus. Students help care for the Lower School Garden by weeding, watering, and harvesting ripe fruits and vegetables. In the state-of-the-art Martha H. Patten Hydroponics Lab & STEAM Classroom, Lower Schoolers join their older peers in cultivating such foods as strawberries and lettuce, learning about plant biology while also serving their community by providing produce to the Mary and Larry Pope Dining Hall and to families throughout the region. Like their visit to the Farmers Market, these learning opportunities throughout the year underscore how coursework across disciplines relates to the roles students play, and will continue to play as adults, as citizens of Hampton Roads.

“The Entire System Becomes Visible to Them”

Among the most valuable aspects of the Virginia Beach Farmers Market trip, according to Rhodes, is that “students can directly see how Virginia’s land, natural resources, people, and businesses work together to meet the needs of a community.”

“The entire system becomes visible to them,” she said. “Farms use natural resources, farmers and other producers create goods, those goods are brought to market, and consumers and their families purchase them. For first graders, concepts like producers, consumers, goods, services, and natural resources can feel fairly abstract in the classroom. At the Farmers Market, those ideas become something they can actually see and experience.”

“It brings so much of our classroom learning to life for our students,” Lanier added. “I loved seeing their excitement as they got to touch, explore, and experience things that they have only talked about in the classroom. It was such a memorable, hands-on experience for our first graders, and I loved watching their curiosity and wonder throughout the day.”

Indeed, this field trip not only illuminated connections between the curriculum and the real world, but also made learning about nature, health, agriculture, and the community undeniably fun. From the Farmers Market’s highly interactive educational programming to an outdoor picnic lunch and the opportunity to enjoy a freshly made sweet treat at the on-site creamery, it was a day full of activities that would bring a smile to any young learner’s face.

“The children absolutely love the experience,” Rhodes said. “It is the kind of field trip they remember and talk about for years!”