School portraits / An early-childhood tradition
Lab's Nursery Class Pressed Apples for One Pitcher of Cider
At the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, nursery classes make their own cider in the fall. The yield is modest. The teacher is honest about it.
Nursery classrooms at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools have been making apple cider since 2011, the school's LabLife magazine reported in spring 2023, starting with a fall harvest festival and spreading through the early childhood program.
The learning, one nursery teacher explained, starts before any pressing: counting, sorting and tasting apples, researching recipes, and connecting it all to the children's family apple-picking trips. Another nursery teacher's class used the project to learn about machines. The cider press, she said, is a simple machine, and it helped the children really understand the process.
Here is the process. Children brought in apples from picking with their families. They sliced them with an apple corer. They broke into small groups, each with a parent volunteer, to use the press. And then the teacher delivered the yield report, in a sentence I would like carved over every kitchen in America: "It was a lot of work to get a pitcher of apple cider!"
That is the most accurate sentence ever printed in a school magazine.
We own a juicer. It was a gift, and it came with a recipe book showing a family in white shirts laughing beside a glass of green juice. I have used it four times. Each time took forty minutes, filled the sink, and produced one small glass, which my wife declined, because she had seen the sink.
The Lab children, after all that, got one more decision, and it's a good one. They could enjoy their cider at room temperature or warmed up.
I asked the youngest which she would choose. She said warm. I asked why. She said because if you'd made it yourself, you'd want it to last longer.
That is the economics of cider, and of most family projects: the less there is, the slower you drink it. Our juicer is in the basement now, next to the apple corer, which I bought for a lesson I was going to teach about simple machines. The simple machine I ended up teaching was the car, on the way to the store, to buy cider.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Making Apple Cider: An Early Childhood Tradition, LabLife Spring 2023 ucls.uchicago.edu
- University of Chicago Laboratory Schools official introduction ucls.uchicago.edu
- Lab public parent and student reviews niche.com