Nutrition and the Small Child

A Content Gardener

There is nothing more satisfying to a small child than to enjoy the fruits of their work. When it comes to food, we strive to eat food that is mostly organic or locally grown and definitely unprocessed and without any refined or chemical sugars. We strive towards balanced and truly healthy snacking and we are very open to the ideas and suggestions of the community. One thing that is very important is to instill an understanding of the whole food cycle, from planting the food to its harvest, preparation and consumption. The preparation of food will be very central to our daily routine, and will also be a main inspiration for the creative endeavors of the children, as we invent songs and dances to honor and celebrate the agricultural cycle and our place in it.

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child? ~Lin Yutang

Cob and Natural Building Materials

This is a picture from the mountains outside of Santa Barbara, at Spirit Pine Ranch, where our friends Betty and Tautacho live and teach workshops in natural building techniques. This is a house made of cob, which is a traditional adobe like building material that can be easily mixed, even by small children using rough sand, clay, straw and water. It is amazing and fun material to build with and play with. It is made by stomping and dancing with your feet until the ingredients are blended together. A wonderful way to teach pre-academic science concepts is through the study and use of natural building materials, including cob, earth, natural plasters and pigments, reclaimed wood and stone. Also, the rhythmic nature of the process of creating cob opens up all kinds of musical group dance opportunities.

Son Jarocho in the preschool curriculum

This is our dear friend Pablo Campechano Gorgonio, of Santiago Tuxtla in Veracruz state, Mexico. He is the maker of our son jarocho instruments and is a wonderful teacher, singer and guardian of his roots culture. This is at a fandango in his town. Son Jarocho is a Mexican folk music style with its own family of instruments, which features zapateado (foot dancing) as the main percussion instrument, improvised call and response vocals and is notable for being a very inclusive musical culture which is easily accessible for little children. The little girl in the foreground is waiting for her turn to hop up on stage and dance. When I was first introduced to Son Jarocho it reminded me so much of the music I performed as a child growing up in the Shenandoah Valley in Luray, Va. I used to be part of a couple of clogging groups. We would perform on Skyline Drive a few times a year for tourists and for festivals and local celebrations. Every culture has it's folk traditions. Though the rhythms are somewhat different, the form is the same, a family of folk instruments, free style verse improvisation, foot percussion and traditional garb. Over the years, I have learned various styles of clogging, tapping, stepping, Zapateado (Mexico) and Zapateo (Peru). We plan to introduce some of these basic foot work styles and rhythms to the children.

La Tarumba and Chebo Ballumbrosio

This is a photo of Chebo and I and the children that I worked with at La Tarumba in Lima, Peru during the summer of 2001. La Tarumba is one of my main inspirations for starting our school. Since that summer, I have dreamed of manifesting a school or a Casa De Cultura (house of culture) like this. La Tarumba teaches children PreK into adulthood through classes and workshops in music, theatre, dance and circus arts. During the summer in a rotating schedule, the kids participate in all of these activities and at the end there is a grand performance that combines all that they have learned. Ah, I must tell you about Chebo Ballumbrosio! Chebo is an accomplished Afro-Peruvian percussionist and dancer who carries the tradition of his people from Chincha Del Carmen, Peru. I have learned so much about music from this amazing man. He was the first person that introduced me to using my body as a percussion instrument. Mine and Chebo's relationship started off with me taking percussion lessons from him and then we discovered that his fancy footwork (Zapateo) and my traditional fancy footwork (clogging and tap) were not really all that different from one another! I learned so much about the impact of cross-cultural exchange that year! Aside from music and dance Chebo is also an amazing clown, painter and chef.

This is Estela and Dave B. preparing Kung Pao Seitan at La Casa del Pan in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. This was a restaurant that we performed at every night when we were living there and we volunteered to be guest chefs to celebrate the week of their 7th anniversary. It was so great to get to know the local markets and food system there and share our own passion for creative organic cooking with the cooking staff at the restaurant and the members of the San Cristobal community. We made about 90 plates of food and raised 80% of the money in that one night to build a school building for indigenous kids in one of the mountain villages nearby.

Interviev with Estela Peredes, Director of La Tarumba Circus School on the Relationship between the Arts and Culture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toveyOQM_pk

Here is a clip of an interview I did with Estela Peredes, the director of La Tarumba, an innovative Circus school in Lima, Peru that I worked at in 2001. We were introduced to Estela P and La Tarumba http://latarumba.com/ingles/escuela.htm by our good friend Lucho Mena. This magical place is the primary inspiration for our school project. It is a circus, music and theatre school for children and young adults three and up. I could curtainly write a book about how amazing and wonderful this school is. It changed my life and the way in which I view early childhood education. This clip is just one piece of a long conversation that I had with Estela P about the history of La Tarumba and her perspective regarding the importance of the arts and cross cultural exchange and how they influence culture.

Our Permaculture plan for BHLC

What you see here is a permaculture landscape plan for the backyard, created for us by Christine Muehlman Gyovai, of the Blue Ridge Permaculture Network. It is a presentation of the plant beds and their contents, as well as play areas and the location of the yurt and the cob playhouse, which the children will help build. If you click on the graphic and zoom in, you will see the tremendous amount of detail in the drawing. On this plan, you will finds areas of berries and medicinal and kitchen herbs, vegetable patches, and fruit trees. It is our hope that the children will participate regularly with the planting and nurturing of these beds, as the plants grow and their fruits become part of their snacks, their songs, and dances.