At the 
end of the first quarter, we shared our progress with parents and teachers. After a delicious lunch (prepared by students, of course), each student gave a talk, with PowerPoint, about his project work during the first quarter. Here are excerpts from two of the presentations:
From Lucas (culinary): “We were harvesting stuff in the garden and decided we had too many tomatoes. Juanita and I didn’t want our tomatoes to rot, so we cooked them down to make a sauce. First I cut up garlic. Then I cut up onion and put it in the pan with olive oil. Then I cut up the tomatoes, big red tomatoes and little cherry tomatoes. Then we put it on high heat, smashed them down in the pot, and cooked it until it boiled and turned to mushy sauce. Then without Juanita looking, as a prank, I put in part of a hot cayenne pepper. It would have been funny to get the taste buds tingling. I knew I wasn’t putting enough in to wreck it. I was surprised that Juanita could taste it, because I didn’t put in a lot. We had a good laugh.”
From Scott (woodshop wall): “The back wall on the barn was rotted. When we talked about projects, I said that I wanted to fix the wall. We talked with Jesse [SHC executive director], and he said it would be a good project. First we measured how long the wall was, how high it was, and calculated for trim, overhang, siding and roofing. Next, we called LaValley’s to price out all the materials needed…The total price for all the materials was $875. We took this price to Jesse and he said “Go ahead, order it!”
From the start, we knew the project would take a month or two. We knew ripping everything off would only take a day or two. The ordered materials came in just over one weekend, so it’s just the labor that can take awhile. It has taken a bit longer because we haven’t been able to work on it consistently. When we started actually working on the wall, we realized there was more rotted wood than we thought. We also realized the reason a lot of it had rotted was because there was no overhang. So first, we had to rip all of the clapboards and the rotted wood off of the wall….”
Other projects included making raised beds for the garden, clearing and marking trails, and researching raising pigs vs. cows.
Our quarter two presentations are scheduled for Friday, January 16.