Though charming and precocious at age 5, Alessandra Vanore is not exactly the world’s leading expert on the art of baking bread. Before Tuesday, when Vanore joined her Hoboken Charter School classmates in baking bread at a local homeless shelter, Vanore said that she had only made bread once. When asked what type of bread she had baked then, Vanore screwed her eyes up like it was the silliest question she had ever heard.
“Plain!” she announced, before explaining that plain was her favorite type.
Despite her penchant for plain, Vanore enthusiastically spent several hours Tuesday morning baking banana bread to supplement meals at the Hoboken Clergy Shelter for the Homeless over the week of Thanksgiving. The Hoboken Charter School was founded by parents, educators and local residents four years ago with community service in mind. Located on the third floor of Demarest Middle School at Fourth and Garden streets, the school was designed to integrate classroom learning with experience-based education.
“Kids here learn by doing,” is an oft-repeated mantra by Jill Singleton, the school’s co-founder and co-coordinator.
This is the second consecutive year that the school has sent a small army of children to the shelter in the days leading up to Thanksgiving to bake bread. This year the school children, who baked in shifts all day Monday and Tuesday, hoped to turn out 40 to 50 loaves. According to Sister Norberta Hunnewinkle, a director of the shelter, their work product was much appreciated.
“They left a little here last night,” said Sister Norberta Tuesday, “and it is already gone. It goes quickly.”
While the children are learning about some of the nuances of baking bread, they are also learning about what it can mean to be homeless and hungry. Since there is not enough room in the shelter’s kitchen for an entire class to bake at the same time, half of the 25 kids that went to the shelter Tuesday bided their time by drawing pictures of things they were thankful in small coloring books designed for the project.
“Everything we do at the Charter School, we try to have a service-learning component,” said Katie Mattis, one of two teachers that brought the kids to the shelter and walked them through the exercises. “They are here not just to learn how to bake, but also to learn how to give to the homeless.”
The lesson did not seem to be lost on Vanore.
“We’re here for the poor people,” she said. “They don’t have anything.”
For many of the children, it seemed to be their first taste of banana bread.
“I like it,” said Tristan Fiume, a 5-and-a-half-year old, who could not say definitively whether he had ever had banana bread before. “My favorite bread is white bread.”