NC School for the Deaf hosts NC Crunch Day

Students across every grade level at the North Carolina School for the Deaf celebrated agriculture at their NC Crunch Day on Wednesday.

NC School for the Deaf Teacher of the Year and agricultural educator Hannah Gordon led the event, gathering staff, local farmers, and even Freedom High School’s agriculture students to make the day engaging.

“I was in FFA [Future Farmers of America] all four years of school,” Gordon said. “Having an FFA chapter here — that’s very important to me … We’re a small school, so we have a small chapter. I’m trying to build it up.”

According to Gordon, Crunch Day is a statewide initiative usually geared toward Pre-K students. Due to the small nature of the school and the opportunity for agricultural education, Gordon worked with her colleagues to make it an institution-wide activity.

Centering around six farm-grown produce items — apples, corn, lettuce, peanuts, pumpkins, and sweet potatoes — students participated in three sets of activities.

First, they arrived at the farmer’s market, sampling each piece of produce at its own dedicated table, where they earned “Crunch Day Cash” that they used to pay for food items made with the produce by Freedom High School’s foods class.

There were clear favorites and less popular choices, with one teacher joking about the overwhelming popularity of his empty lettuce table.

Second, they attended a presentation by Jeff and Wendy Houk from Green Hill Farm, learning how corn is processed to make cornmeal and popcorn. Students guessed at the amount of acreage in North Carolina used to grow corn, most seriously underestimating the 900,000 acres the state produces each year.

The Houks passed around cornmeal and popcorn, highlighting the various uses for agricultural products in the state.

“I promote agriculture to young people,” Jeff said. “It’s a dying thing.”

“We need more farmers,” Wendy said. “The food really does taste better when it comes from your land and you’ve grown it, and you’ve harvested it. You know where it came from and that it’s healthy.”

After their initial presentation, the Houks told a story about Jeff galavanting across the farm, eating everything in his path, and explaining where each produce item grew.

Finally, students moved to the hands-on activities: stringing apples, making sweet potato stamps, creating edible peanut butter play dough, planting lettuce seeds, and making a “dancing corn experience” with baking soda, vinegar, and popcorn, which results in a lava lamp-like experiment. To top off the activities, local farms and Food Lion donated more than 60 pumpkins, meaning each student finished by visiting the pumpkin patch and taking one home.

“Hannah has expressed multiple times how much she wants Freedom to be involved with things on the campus,” Freedom agricultural teacher Dustin Hagler said as his students dispersed to assist with the various activities. “She’s just trying to get us involved, and we try to be a service-led organization, so anything we can do to help out. This ties to agriculture, so it’s right up our alley.”

Gordon hopes to host the event each year going forward. Her passion for working with the students and her tenacity for agriculture push her to give each pupil a range of experiences.

“We’ll do different foods next year — every year,” she said. “With [students] being here from the time they’re in Pre-K to the 12th grade, if we can keep it up and every year we can do six different foods — that’s kind of the goal.”