Care for life

2 June 2026

Term 2, 2025–26 · Water Dragons · Ages 5–7

What does it mean to care — not as a feeling, but as an action? What does it really mean to care — not as a feeling, but as something you do with your hands? For one term, the youngest learners at REAL School set out to answer that question. They preserved vegetables in jars, made sandwiches for strangers, built advocacy posters for hedgehogs, and learned to read the winter sky. Everything is built from the driving question:

How can we care for life in winter by preserving food and supporting human and animal communities?

The project moved across two tracks simultaneously: caring for people, and caring for animals and the natural world. Over time, the children discovered that these are rarely separate things.

Real people

The students worked with several community partners, including:

• Budapest Bike Maffia, the Budapest community initiative that distributes food to people experiencing homelessness, received the children's fermented vegetables and sandwiches. Bike Maffia members also came to school to meet the class during preparation.

• LIFE BiodiverCity educators visited the School for a session on pollinators, connecting to the class's wider learning about caring for living things in winter.

• Former Earth and Air Dragon students visited to share their own experience volunteering with Budapest Bike Maffia — explaining the challenges of preparing 106 sandwiches, advising on what to buy, and helping the Water Dragons plan their own contribution.

• Hien, a parent, came into the classroom to lead a session on kombucha. Children touched, described, and tasted a real SCOBY, then documented the fermentation process in their science journals.

Real places

The project took the children beyond the classroom to two key locations:

• Lehel Market, where children went on a food rescue mission — collecting surplus produce that might otherwise go to waste, which they later turned into sandwiches for people without homes.

• Óbuda Island, the class's regular Wednesday base, where they carried out science observations, explored states of matter, created weather poems, built cloud-hunter frames from upcycled pizza boxes, and constructed sundials using wooden sticks.

Real products

By the end of the term, the children had made and contributed real things, including:

• Fermented vegetables in jars, prepared using dry-salt and brine fermentation methods and donated to Budapest Bike Maffia.

• Sandwiches, made from food sourced at Lehel Market and handed over to Budapest Bike Maffia volunteers.

• Fermentation booklets, documenting both fermentation processes with writing, illustrations, and diagrams — the children's own scientific records of the whole experiment.

• Hedgehog highway posters, created in pairs and displayed around the school neighbourhood, advocate for small openings in garden fences that allow hedgehogs to move safely between spaces.

• Science journals, in which children recorded weekly observations of the potato experiment across four different conditions throughout the term.

• Winter care stories, written using story maps and presented using pop-up and flip-book storytelling strategies.