School news
Fantastic Fungi
By Ada Mahood
On Wednesday, April 17, some fun(gi) things were happening in the greenhouse. Woodstock Alumni David Andrews and his partner Erin Donahue from Tiny Acres Farm, visited the greenhouses to demonstrate how to plant mushrooms and to talk about their business. Students engaged in hands-on activities such as drilling the holes for the mushroom spawn, learning how to put the spawn in the holes and sealing them with beeswax.
For a little bit of a backstory, David went to WUHSMS and took Agricultural classes that were offered. One year he and Kat Robbins, who helps coordinate our CRAFT department, went to Cobb Hill farm where he learned the ins and outs of mushrooms. This hands-on experience sparked his interest in becoming a mushroom farmer. He moved out to Colorado after high school graduation, where he and his partner started experimenting and growing mushrooms for their own personal use. When they moved to Maine a few years later they made the decision to switch from personal growing to commercial farming of mushrooms. Their business has grown through local farmers markets, and restaurants. Right now they have over 2,000 logs in production. They inoculate (plant) around 1,000 a year. David's long term goal is to have 10,000 logs in production.
In those 2,000 logs they grow many varieties of mushrooms including, 13 varieties of Shitake, 4 varieties of Oyster mushrooms, Lions Mane, Chestnut, etc.
All of the CRAFT classes were involved in inoculating around 60 oak logs donated by Leo Maslan. The students drilled holes in the logs and filled them with Blue Oyster and Shitake mushrooms. Middle School students “planted” a Wine Cap mushroom bed in our permaculture garden. For the Shitake, it’ll take about 12-18 months for them to fully become mushrooms, but the Wine Caps take as little time as 1 month. Come by and see the fruits of our labor!
Woodstock-Madrid Exchange April, 2024
From April 10th through the 20th, seventeen Woodstock students participated in the second leg of a cultural exchange with students from Salesianos Paseo de Extremadura in Madrid, Spain.
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Here is your visual journey. Click here to see more pictures. Spain was fun!
EARTH DAY
Earth Day 2024 was a perfect sunshiney day for students in grades 7-12 to connect with the earth and each other. For the last two hours of the day, students engaged in workshops that included: making reusable beeswax food wraps, crocheting a hanging plant hanger, doing bird painting with VINS, making art from fruits and veggies, making wildflower seed bombs, learning to grow and harvest microgreens, learning vegan cooking skills with Heather Wolfe, making their own eco-friendly cleaning products including a shoe deodorizer (hello spring athletes!), greening up campus, learning from Change the World Kids, and creating a new perennial pollinator hedgerow. Seventh graders hiked through the King Farm and a group of high school students helped five different classes at Woodstock Elementary School perform stewardship of their campus, Vail Field, and their outdoor classroom on Mount Peg. This was a tremendous effort where students and staff came together to create, pause, and practice stewardship. A huge thanks to everyone involved!
WUHS Senior Visits Freshman Class
Senior Vera Windish presented to the ninth graders last week, sharing her experiences as a Jewish student here at WUHSMS. She highlighted the joys and challenges of being Jewish in the state of Vermont. Vera, who loves to bake and who plans to attend culinary school in the fall, also baked black and white cookies to share with the students. Ninth graders asked many questions of Vera, including, "can someone be ethnically Jewish but practice a different religion?" and "has your experience here at WUHS improved over the years, or do you still experience religious bigotry?" As part of their Modern World History and English I classes, ninth grade students have been engaged in an interdisciplinary unit about the Holocaust. Hearing from students like Vera helps students make important connections to the present. Thank you, Vera, for your visit!"
Dance Theatre of Harlem Workshop
On Thursday, April 18, the Middle School and High School participated in the Dancing Through Barriers educational program with the Dance Theatre of Harlem. The Dancing Through Barriers program fosters teamwork and community building through dance and dance education. Participants danced their way through history from a movement exercise to understand the Middle Passage, small group work to connect to each individual’s heritage, the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance. Ms. Perkins commented that it was fun to be “moving as a community of many communities.” During the program, participants also learned about the founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Arthur Mitchell, and the ballet company’s history.
One of the highlights of the High School program was the “Soul Train Line” where two dancers at a time dance down the center aisle formed by two parallel lines of people cheering the dancers on while waiting for their turn to dance, strut or bust a move!
A number of students provided testimonials at the end of the workshops, and they used words like “exciting,” “fun,” and “a great opportunity” to describe their experiences. And, in one very moving testimonial, Kiki Grillo-Chope stated, “I love dancing!” When asked what she thought about the workshop, Sadie Boulbol said, “It was enlightening to see how they put that story to choreography.” Clara Burkholder, who takes dance lessons, even performed her solo competition piece at the end of the workshop for the Dance Theatre of Harlem educators’ feedback and critique.
This programming was made possible thanks to a grant from Pentangle.
