YouthWork and Learn has started the school year in good form. Here are reports from our second day at Smokey House:
From Brittany: First year ever being at the Smoky House – makes me feel good. This is my second day being here, and it’s amazing to have this opportunity to be here for school, to help everyone out by working in their garden. The past two days of working in the garden feels good. I love working outside and being able to work in a garden for other people. It’s such a wonderful job. I never knew half of the stuff I have learned in the last two days.
The Smoky House is such a good place to be. There are many new things to do and learn about if you didn’t already know about them. I honestly think that if I did not come to school at the Smoky House I would not know most of the stuff I keep learning about. As days go on more and more things keep happening, it is for the best! The teachers here are friendly and really nice. They are very welcoming and over all just make school a lot better for us. I would not know what to do without my teachers and the stuff they teach us about.
Working/going to school here is a lot of help in your everyday outside life. It helps you also use all the information you have learned at jobs or even just for you to teach other people in your family. We have not only worked in the garden, we also learned about all the objects growing in it. We also got to know each other and some of the things we enjoy in our lives. Everyone respects one another, and we all work as a team. I have never seen a school where anyone gets along like we do here. I would not trade being here for the world. I love this place and everything we do here!!!
From Dillon: Today at the Smokey House, we talked about about making a salsa and pasta sauce using mostly things grown in the garden. We looked at the cilantro, tomatoes, and beans, among other things. We then harvested the pumpkins. I also picked some beet leaves to organize them so they might grow better. We also went to the bridge by the Herrick House and it looks great. We ate lunch there and tried to put rocks on top of each other. Today was my 2nd day here for this year. I hope this year that I learn a lot of new things. I also learned today that I might be creating a shelter outside in the woods during winter. I also might be learning about Vermont history. Something we all talked about today was selling rocks online. Today was overall good. – Dillon
From Robin: Ahh, late summer on the mountain. It is good to be back – working in the garden, pitching pumpkins, planning projects and activities, walking the trails, and preparing to make salsa and pasta sauce on Wednesday.
For lunch we walked out to the trailhead and sat on the bridge that we moved last term, talking about life, families, and futures. Then I mentioned a video I had seen of an amazing rock stacker, an artist really, creating improbable gravity defying events. So we climbed down into the stream bed and started stacking, and it works! Real people can do it too!
Then in a 180˚ shift we returned to the center and began revisiting the blogging and technology we use to share this with the world. From peppers to pumpkins to pixels – a pretty good day, I would say!