Fiber Fun!

Mountain Laurel Montessori Students 

visit Central Virginia Fiber Mill

Our 9th year Sheep Manager organized a visit to the Central Virginia Fiber Mill to deliver the fleeces from our sheep.  The fleece will become lovely roving and yarn.  We will have new yarn for sale soon!

THANK YOU to Mary Kearny for teaching us about the process from raw fleece to yarn, roving, and batting.

As a bonus, we got to meet some very curious alpaca.

Spring Lambs Arrive!

We have 3 new lambs at the Farm School!

We were all able to observe this ram lamb being born

This lambing season was challenging, but provided many opportunities for biology lessons and real life decision making. Many thanks to Brandon, our Farm Manager, for his attention to the sheep; he is going to be happy to get a good night's sleep now!

Lambs for Sale!

Mountain Laurel Montessori Farm School is selling 5 beautiful Border Leicester ram lambs. 

They are pedigreed with papers. Born in March.  They have been hand raised by the students and are very gentle.  Would be great for 4-H or another setting where they will be around children and youth.

Border Leicester sheep are a dual purpose breed: good for both wool and meat.  These lads would make great breeding stock.

Their fleeces are gorgeous: two black, three white.

Call for more info: (540) 675-1011 or e-mail mlmfarmschool@earthlink.net

As part of the Microeconomics curriculum, Mountain Laurel Montessori Farm School students manage the money that is made through sale of farm products, as well as the expenses generated by the farm.  Raising, breeding, and selling the sheep are part of learning about economics hands-on.

Spring Lambs Born

Spring lambing time is here!  The students were able to witness the birth of twin lambs at school last week.  They watched in wrapt silence for over an hour while one of the ewes delivered. 

It was an amazing experience to watch both the process of the birth, and the reactions of the students. The moment elicited great compassion from the students for the ewes they have cared for so diligently, and for the new lambs.

The students had prepared for lambing through their studies in the Sheep Occupation Project.  They studied the anatomy of the sheep, the nutritional needs of sheep and lambs, and prepared for the lambs by building housing and providing food and water. 

So many science and history lessons have grown spontaneously from caring for the pregnant sheep and new lambs. For example, we had an impromptu genetics lesson in the barn as we tried to determine the genotype of the black ewe and ram who produced two black lambs and one white one.

Not to miss out on the attention, here one of the pregnant ewes takes time for a conversation with a student.

Students and Sheep Star in Shepherd's Play

Two Farm School students acted in The Shepherd's Play in December. The Shepherd's Play is a local tradition in Washington, Virginia ("Little Washington"). One of the sheep had a surprise cameo as well!

"So, it is good when a sheep burps?"

One of the Occupation groups (see below for explanation) this Fall is studying sheep. The students noticed that the sheep frequently burp. The question, "why do sheep burp?" led to a lesson on ruminant digestion and a fermentation experiment.

To simulate the fermentation that happens in one of the sheep's four stomachs, the students combined yeast, water, and sugar in flasks and attached balloons to the top of the jar. Learning about variables, some changed the amount of sugar or yeast, or varied the temperature. The amount of gas released was measured by placing the balloons in water and measuring the displacement.

Many Montessori Adolescent Programs use the terminology Occupation and Humanities Projects for the long term interdisciplinary studies in the curriculum. Occupation projects are science based, and revolve around the real needs of the farm (for instance, Sheep because this will be the first time we breed the sheep, or Wind Energy because we need to install a windmill to aerate the pond). The science standards of learning are covered through this project-based approach. They are called Occupations because they reflect the developmental needs of young adolescents as they look to the adult world and wonder "how will I contribute to society?" "What will I do?" They are trying on the occupation of farmer, naturalist, biologist, engineer, or veterinarian to see how it fits.

Microbial fun with All Star Septic

Chris Boucher, owner of All Star Septic, and father of a Farm School student, showed students how the septic system worked while he pumped it out.

It tied in perfectly with our recent lessons and experiments on microbial digestion in the Sheep Occupation Project. Students have been conducting experiments to measure the amount of gas released from yeast fermentation under varying conditions.

Rappahannock County Farm Tour

Come visit the Farm School during the 1st annual Rappahannock County Farm Tour Weekend: September 26th-27th.
Students will be giving tours, you can join us in planting garlic in the garden, or learn to spin wool into yarn or felt it. We'll be serving up pork BBQ from our own school-grown pigs and many yummy side dishes, all cooked by the students and teachers. And, you can pet the sheep, hold a chicken, gather eggs, and generally spend a nice day on the farm.
For more info: http://farmtour.visitrappahannockva.com/index.html

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/