Mountain Laurel Montessori Farm School: Live On Air!

Mountain Laurel Montessori Farm School: Live On Air!

Farm School Director, Susan Holmes, and 2 Mountain Laurel Montessori students were interviewed live last week on the Valley Today Show, The River 95.3.

You will find the link to listen to the show here:

http://royalbroadcasting.net/Podcasts/Valley%20Today/20110120VT.mp3

Thanks so much to Lonnie Hill and Mario Retrosi for inviting us on the show!

Northern Virginia Daily prints story about the Farm School

Home on the farm

Student-run school combines studies with agriculture

By J.R. Williams --jrwilliams@nvdaily.com

Printed in the The Northern Virginia Daily Newspaper on November 12, 2010. Click here to read the story and see the photos: http://www.nvdaily.com/lifestyle/2010/11/home-on-the-farm.php

The Farm School Live On The Air!

Congratulations

to students Ursula Bell and Zoe Pettler

who did an outstanding job in an interview on the local radio show The Valley Today!

You can listen to the podcast online here:

http://www.theriver953online.com/page.php?page_id=41558

Scroll down and click on
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010: Mountain Laurel Montessori School Staff

The students, along with Farm School Director Susan Holmes, were interviewed about upcoming events and recent happenings at Mountain Laurel Montessori Farm School.

Thanks to Mario Retrosi for inviting us to be on the show.

OPEN HOUSE: Sunday, Jan. 31st, 2010

You are invited to visit Mountain Laurel Montessori School!

OPEN HOUSE
January 31st, 2010
1:00-3:30

Both campuses welcome your visit.


Farm School
(grades 7-9)
23 Sunny Slope Lane
Flint Hill, VA

Front Royal Campus (toddler - elementary)
155 Biggs Dr
Front Royal, VA 22630

Call (540) 675-1011 for more information

Alisa Gravitz, Green America Director, visits Farm School

Alisa Gravitz, Green America (Co-op America) Executive Director, visited the Farm School during the Rappahannock County Farm Tour 2009! Here she is purchasing produce from Allie, Farm School Market Manager and 9th year student.

The mission of Green America is "to harness economic power—the strength of consumers, investors, businesses, and the marketplace—to create a socially just and environmentally sustainable society"

Candidate John Lesinski visits Farm School during Farm Tour

John Lesinski, candidate for Virginia State Delegate, and his wife Heidi visited the Farm School during the Rappahannock Farm Tour. We were pleased to be able to share our program with him.

Garrison Keillor Comments on Farm Schools

The February 11, 2006, broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion (from Minnesota Public Radio) originated from the University of Minnesota, Morris, whose campus is the former West Central School of Agriculture. WCSA was a residential high school for farm children from 1910 to 1963, offering traditional high school studies as well as agricultural and practical home skills. Montessorians may notice a striking resemblance to the Montessori concept of the Erdkinder (adolescent Farm School).

Host Garrison Keillor described WCSA and commented, "Someday, somebody is going to do a study on this and discover that animal husbandry is a valuable tool in building character, and they’ll come up with an idea for a residential high school where you can learn carpentry and cooking and each week taking a couple of hours to take care of an infant, and it’ll be like the Montessori of the future, except they’ll call it the Morris movement." http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2006/02/11/ Go here to visit the Prairie Home Companion web site and hear the entire show or just Segment 3, where Mr. Keillor gives a bit of the history of the University of Minnesota, Morris and the West Central School of Agriculture.

Text from North American Montessori Teacher's Association (NAMTA)

Like Gardens, students grow throughout summer

By Roger Piantadosi Rappahannock News Staff Writer
Source: Rappahannock News
THURSDAY, AUGUST 13 2009

At the Mountain Laurel Montessori Farm School in Flint Hill, you probably wouldn't want to automatically associate the words “summer” and “vacation.”

Summer is a break from daily classes for the 15 seventh- through ninth-graders who attend the five-year-old Farm School – and thus tend its 23 acres of pastures, woods and a pond plus the main schoolhouse, a large hoop barn and assorted outbuildings, a few pigs, a dozen chickens and some sheep.

But throughout the growing season, Mountain Laurel students return at least one day a week to pick tomatoes, peppers, beans and greens from the garden they planted in the spring, and to help farm manager Sarah Cooper transport and sell them at the Front Royal Farmers' Market, among such other chores as mowing, trimming, weeding and cleaning.

The other day, the farm's three Border Leicester sheep needed to be moved from a front pasture to a clover-laden enclosure with a new sheep house built from 2x4s, heavy-gauge fence and waterproof tarps by student Phillip Grambo, 15, who actually graduated from the farm school in June. Helping out were Phillip's not-very-identical twin brother, Rory, also bound for Fauquier High School next month, and current students Joshua Owens, 13, and Allie Mingo and Erika Hughey, both 14.

Students come by in summer, as they do throughout the school year, for “community work,” says school director Susan Holmes, meaning the school community – this being a Montessori school – but the greater community as well.

“In fact we're hoping this fall to be doing some work with the Plant-a-Row people,” she says, speaking of the county's new food bank. “I want to get the students down there to see the fruits of their efforts, to help out, and meet some of the people who are picking up produce. And it's so wonderful to see just all of what people produce and donate all in one place like that.”

The sheep go quietly, sort of, to their new pasture. Rory turns on the new solar-powered electric fence; Holmes fills the water buckets that Erika and Joshua have carried over.

The students chat quietly with each other when they aren't helping to lift and turn the sheep house, fetch corn, bring the water hose. Except for the occasional random vault over a low fence or playful leap up to swat a low-hanging oak branch, they seem more like young adults than teenagers.

Someone asks Holmes: So, are you teaching these young people to be farmers?She smiles, glancing at the students around her. “We are just teaching them to be well-rounded people,” she says. The farm, it turns out, is a way of taking what they learn inside about chemistry, physics, history and math and giving it a grounding in . . . well, yes.

The ground.

http://www.rappnews.com/news/2009/aug/13/mountain-laurel-farm-school-has-year-round-curricu/

Local 9th grade student sells her photography at the Front Royal Farmer’s Market

Source: Warren County Sentinel
Thursday, July 30, 2009


Allie Mingo, 14 year old and rising 9th grade student at Mountain Laurel Montessori Farm School, smiles as she sells her hand made photo cards at the Front Royal Farmer’s Market on Thursday, July 23rd. Sales from the card and from the meat and vegetables, go back into the Farm School’s microeconomy to pay for plants for the garden and food for the animals.

At the Farm School, students run both the farm and school alongside their teachers.

The Farm School is one of the vendors at the new Farmer’s Market, held each Thursday 4 to 8 and Saturday 9 to 1 behind the gazebo in downtown Front Royal. At Mountain Laurel Montessori Farm School, students in grades 7-9 run the farm alongside their teachers.

The curriculum is project-based and hands-on, based on the needs of the farm. The students study biology, for example, by learning about the sheep as they also learn about how to care for them. Studying topics such as cell structure and the nitrogen cycle take on new excitement when they are applied to a real life situation.

The students at the Montessori Farm School raise pigs, sheep, chickens, and bees and have a large market garden. They sell their pork, eggs, and produce at the market, and put the proceeds back into the Farm School’s microeconomy to pay for feed, hay, and tools. The students manage the microeconomy and cooperatively make decisions about how to spend the money. And, there is room for invention.

Allie has an interest in photography. She decided this year to make her photos of the farm: pigs, chickens, landscapes, into photo cards to be sold as part of the microeconomy. First she sold them at school functions. Then, Herb Melrath, owner of Front Royal’s Daily Grind, offered to sell them at his store. The cards have been so popular that Allie now sells the cards at 3 local businesses: The Daily Grind, Hands to Create, and Delilah’s. All of the proceeds from the cards still go back into the Farm School’s microconomy.

By acting on her idea, this local youth is gaining experience in running a small business: from inspiration and design, to production, marketing, and accounting. You can also see Allie’s cards, along with the produce from the Farm School garden, pork sausage from their pigs, and eggs from their chickens every Thursday at the Front Royal Farmer’s Market.

http://www.thewarrensentinel.com/editions/view/EC.mont.school.html/2009-07-30