This story is written by WAB's Early Childhood Center teacher, Marta Smith. 

This year, our Early Years (EY) is working on a few year-long units at the same time. One of our units has the central idea of "We create opportunities for people to come together."

The lines of inquiry are:

• An inquiry into the reasons people come together,
• An inquiry into creating contexts for participation,
• An inquiry into inclusion and how it makes us feel.

Another unit has the central idea of "Community spaces bring a sense of purpose and belonging".

The lines of inquiry are:

• An inquiry into the purpose of spaces in the local environment,
• An inquiry into the responsibility for shared spaces,
• An inquiry into why we change shared spaces

Community Soup Day touched on the 4 highlighted lines of inquiry.

We read the book Soup Day by Melissa Iwai, and as a recipe for the soup is included in the book, we decided to make this soup as a community and invite ES faculty to have soup with us, supporting the line of inquiry of a reason why people come together.

We took a field trip to the market near the High School, and each homeroom in the EY was responsible for buying one or two vegetables for the recipe. This gave us an insight into how the market was organized and how the market had a purpose in the local community.

We changed the ECC piazza (line of inquiry regarding changing spaces) so that each homeroom had a table to chop their vegetable (creating contexts for participation) with the idea being that if a homeroom decided not to participate, the result would be a not-so-delicious soup.

All in all, it was a successful event. We needed more ES faculty members to pop by to eat soup! The children had many suggestions as to how we could make this happen next year, such as taking soup to them!