October 22, 2021

Photo: Students complete a magical task during WARP.

When North Country School opened its doors more than eighty years ago, our founders, Walter and Leonora Clark, believed that play was a crucial, and too often overlooked, part of childhood. Since 1938 our inspiring teachers have been committed to providing students with the opportunity to learn, grow, and explore the world around them, not just with academic curiosity, but with wide-eyed wonder and joy.

This past Sunday we watched our students engage their imaginations during our annual all-day WARP event. WARP, or Wilderness Action Role Play, is a day when our entire community works together to solve puzzles, complete magical quests, and battle ancient creatures, all while exploring our 220-acre campus. It is a day when lighthearted silliness can be found around every turn. We are proud to preserve this special aspect of our founding philosophy for the students in our care, and we are grateful to be part of an organization that provides children with the space and time to simply play.

ACADEMICS

Top: 7th-grade science students take temperature readings at the compost pile. Middle 1: Checking the compost temperature. Middle 2: Ira and Octa present their poster on Ancient Greece. Bottom: Social studies Venn diagram about farming.

One of our favorite aspects of the North Country School experience is how our academic curriculum continuously connects to our real-world surroundings. This week our 7th-grade students began an exciting project that tied their science and math classes to our farm and garden program. On Tuesday, students visited the compost pile in Dexter Pasture during their science class to take temperature readings in different spots and at various depths. They then brought the temperature data to their math class, where they used spreadsheets to visualize the information collected. The next stage of the project will be to bury raw farm eggs in the pile to see if the temperature of the compost is hot enough to cook the eggs, and if so, how long the process will take. Though the class will not eat the compost-cooked eggs, their findings will give our students greater insight into the energy that is produced when organic matter goes through the composting process.

Meanwhile, our 5th-grade social studies students researched different aspects of daily life in Ancient Greece, such as agriculture and industry, special events, and government and citizenship, while connecting those aspects of life to our own NCS campus. Students worked in pairs to present what they’d learned to their peers, before the class created a Venn diagram comparing our farm to those in Ancient Greece. With our recent potato harvest on their minds, students were able to identify similarities and differences between our more modern farming practices and the older models used centuries ago.

Top: 4th-grade science class discusses repeating patterns in nature. Middle 1: Wyatt learns about branching patterns. Middle 2: Eleanor finds repeating patterns in flowers. Bottom: 4th-grade science students have fun while learning in nature.

Our 4th-grade students also tied their science and math curriculum together while learning about Fibonacci numbers—a sequential numerical sequence that accounts for many of the repeating patterns found in nature. The lesson began in their classroom, where students looked at several different types of patterns, before the group ventured outside to find examples of those patterns in the plants growing on campus. Everyone was excited to see real-life examples of repeating patterns in our garden’s echinacea flowers, as well as in the pine needles on our conifer trees.