Amy Driscoll, of the King Arthur Flour Co., spent the week of April 4-7 in Blackstone teaching fifth-grade students to bake.    

The “Learn Bake Share” program uses bread-baking as a forum to teach students about math, science and community service.

Along with two student volunteers, Driscoll demonstrated how to properly measure both liquid and dry ingredients, mix and knead bread dough and shape it into beautiful loaves, pretzels and cinnamon buns.

She discussed the science behind yeast, a fungus, that uses sugar and water for energy and forms carbon dioxide, which makes the bread dough rise.

King Arthur Flour provided each student with the flour, yeast and other supplies to bake two loaves of bread. One they shared with their family and the other loaf was donated to local people in need.

In addition to the baking lesson, students attended five outdoor learning stations that served as a hands-on review for fifth-grade SOLs.

They saw how wheat went from the field to a loaf of bread, made “Oobleck” as a review of mixtures, solutions, solids and liquids, and used fractions and an apple to see how little topsoil we have left on earth to feed all of the nearly 7 billion. Each student also made their own animal cell model and extracted the DNA from a strawberry.

More than 1,000 students, teachers and parents from Lunenburg, Dinwiddie, Nottoway, Brunswick and Amelia counties attended fifth-grade Ag Days at the Virginia Tech Southern Piedmont Agricultural Research and Extension Center.   

The activities, which were free to students, were conducted by King Arthur Flour, Nottoway FFA, Crown Orchard Co., Donald Turner, Virginia Tech, and Virginia Cooperative Extension, which included Lunenburg County Agents Lindy Tucker, ANR, and Dillon Robinson, 4-H.