This past weekend our community participated in a longtime North Country School tradition, our annual WARP event. WARP, or Wilderness Active Role Play, brings our student body together for a day of taking on roles in an intricate fantasy storyline—complete with costumes and handmade foam swords and shields—while traveling across the many acres of woods and trails of the NCS campus. It was a day full of fun and adventure, made possible by the many weeks of hard work and planning of NCS teachers and students. This week we also welcomed a guest to our campus, Albany-based poet and author D. Colin. D. led writing workshops and special performance sessions, and her visit tied together themes in several of our English and history classes.
ACADEMICS
At NCS students are given the opportunity to study Spanish or Japanese as a new language. In this week’s Spanish 2 class, students Ella, Julia, Sally, and Tianyu practiced their prepositions with a creative group activity. The group made selections from lists of verbs, nouns, and prepositions to create instructional sentences. They then gave those instructions to their peers to translate and complete. Ella followed her translated sentence’s instructions by standing next to the door, Sally followed her instructions to sit in front of the books, and Tianyu completed his translated task to yell “I love Spanish class” from inside the bathroom.
This week our community welcomed a special guest visitor, poet and writer D. Colin. D. spent the day leading poetry-writing workshops and performing an in-character session on the life of Harriet Tubman. She worked with students one-on-one and in groups on their own poetry and ended the day by hosting a performance poetry event in our new WallyPAC performing arts center. Both D. and several of our students including Inyene, Emily, Nate, Evie, Olivia, Jonah, and Julia performed moving original pieces surrounded by an enthusiastic and supportive audience of students and teachers.
ARTS
Down in the art studio Noni’s ceramics students are learning to throw and trim pottery on the wheel. Students including Alex, Helen, Teagan, and Grace worked on carving the bottoms of their bowls, while Summer centered a wet ball of clay and began to open up the inside of a new project. Once their bowls are trimmed and dried out the pottery will be fired into bisqueware in the kiln before being dipped in liquid glaze and fired a second time.
In Courtney’s film class students are filming and editing the original movies that they wrote and storyboarded earlier in the term. Their completed, documentary-style films all focus on different aspects of life at North Country School. Tianyu’s project is about barn chores, Eden and Azalech’s film is about homenight, and Sally’s film is a comedic, mockumentary-style project analyzing the difference between gossip and truth in the NCS social scene.
OUTDOORS
This past weekend teachers Gavi and Elie took students on the second annual “Noonmark on Noonmark” hiking trip. The group, which included students Frank, Tristan, Paula, and Isabella, carried a pie from the Noonmark Diner up to the summit of Noonmark Mountain for a tasty (high-elevation) dessert reward.
This past weekend the school community also participated in our 15th annual WARP, or Wilderness Active Role Play. The daylong Sunday event, which teacher Larry’s design classes have been organizing for the past several weeks, took place on campus throughout many acres of woods and trails and involved an intricate fantasy storyline. Students spent the day battling warring factions, searching for enchanted objects, and encountering magical creatures, and, by the end of the afternoon, peace was achieved across the land. After dinner and some much-needed rest time, the community regrouped to tell tales of the day’s many adventures.
FARM AND GARDEN
This past week marked the first hay delivery of the season at the barn. At North Country School, we bring in bales of hay from a local farm, and that hay is used year-round for animal feed and bedding. Barn manager Erica and farm intern Bri led an afternoon out-time with teachers and students to unload hundreds of heavy bales from the hay elevator into the barn loft. The group worked together throughout the hour to stock our barn with hay, ensuring that our horses, sheep, and goats will have the food they will need for the next several months.
During barn chores this past week students Mia, Wyatt, and Sky worked together to care for our farm animals. For their jobs on sheep and goats, the group put out new hay in the animal pens and filled up water troughs with fresh water. After giving the animals their nightly grain, they swept up the barn foyer. Sheep and goats are two of the many animal chores at our barn and are an important part of keeping our farm animals healthy, happy, and safe as the animals in-turn provide our community with wool, food, and recreation.
Check back next week to see what we’re up to on our mountain campus.
For more information about the #This Week At NCS blog, contact Becca Miller at .
#ThisWeekAtNCS