Above, left to right: Beth and Dana walking along Phenology Trail 1.  Below: Grace photographs the hobblebush (Viburnum lantanoides)

The Community School and The Rey Foundation are collaborating on a 6-week course, Monitoring Climate Change, that looks at the science, debate and possible solutions to anthropogenic climate change.  To find out more about this program, go to http://lostpass.net/climatechange/welcome/

We have an amazing line-up of items for you to choose from, something to interest young and older, indoor and outdoor-enthusiasts , art lovers and romantics!

Click here for pre-auction online bidding and see photos of  twenty  of the silent auction items. Click on auction catalog to see the full listing of items.

ADMISSION IS FREE and all are welcome!

Here’s some of what you’ll find:
• 100 board feet of local wide pine flooring
• a home-brewer’ s kit and NH Brewfest package
• a trail-riding/ picnic afternoon in Tamworth
• composting start-up help
• adventure mountain biking in Maine (hot tub included)
• nontoxic cleaners
• a day of professional window cleaning
• an assortment of local, organic meats
• a summer share from our own CSA garden

Ninth grader Dana displays the baby quilt she and her sister made for the auction

Plus regular auction goodies like
• concert tickets
• scenic airplane rides
• B & B’s to stay at
• beautiful artwork (originals and prints) by Peter Ferber, Sandy Martin, Willey Fromm, Ashley Bullard, Janina   Lamb, and Priscilla Hodges
• hand-crafted baby quilts
• unique jewelry
…and tons more!

Come join the fun with auctioneer extraordinaire George Cleveland once again volunteering his services. All proceeds support financial aid for Community School students.

Check our website for pre-auction online bidding items (available to win prior to the 17th), then join us at the school on the 17th for the “rest of the story!” Appetizers, desserts, and punch for all; movie and popcorn for the kids during the live auction bidding; and all for a good cause!

While we may agree, not everyone has the option of just picking up and traveling the world.  Isn’t it wonderful that sometimes the world is poised and ready to come to YOU!  Without packing a bag, you can enjoy a bigger world when you welcome an exchange student into your home and your life.

Are you interested?  In years past, life at The Community School has been enriched by students from Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, Madagascar, Japan, the Ukraine, Venezuela, Switzerland, and Thailand.  Many of these exchange students found us through Youth for Understanding, an organization which has facilitated study abroad opportunities since 1951.  And each of these students needed a place to live and a family to be part of while they studied at TCS.

Now is the time to decide if we will be hosting an exchange student next year.  At 7 pm, Thursday, April 8^th, Liz Sura, Regional Field Director for Youth for Understanding, will be on campus to answer your questions.  She comes with information about students from far away who are eager to practice their English skills and learn about our culture next year, studying at TCS.

Why not come find out if this is an option you’d like to consider?  Maybe this is the year for YOU to open your home – expand your vision – and change your world.

For more information about the Youth for Understanding program, its history, and to view comments from other host families, visit http://yfuusa.org/ Call and let us know you’ll be joining us.

Two writers consult (Butterfly, 11th grader, with teacher Mark Bickford)

A classroom of adolescents bent over their writing assignments and loving it?  Every middle school and high school teacher is well aware of the inward groans and CliffsNotes sales that reading and writing assignments generate.  A change in attitude may require a paradigm shift in the classroom.

Students and teachers at The Community School in South Tamworth have happily existed  in that “shifted paradigm” for years. Taking advantage of the small class sizes, English teachers use techniques developed by Nancie Atwell, award-winning teacher and founder of the Center for Teaching and Learning.  “Writers need regular frequent chunks of time they can count on, anticipate, and plan for,” asserts Atwood (1998, In the Middle: Writing, Reading, and Learning with Adolescents, p. 91), and by writers she means your teenager and mine!

Can academic excellence really flourish in an environment without lectures and worksheets, where students read and write what interests them?  Learning from mini-lessons and one-on-one student/teacher conferences, students at The Community School are writing poetry, essays, well-researched reports, creative non-fiction and fantasy.

“I structure my classes to offer a lot of guided independence,” explains 9th through 11th grade English teacher Mark Bickford.  “I have regular one-on-one conferences, where I sit down with a student and we discuss the writings he or she has been working on, what works, what doesn’t work, what to focus on for further revisions.  Students appreciate this because they are not stuck doing something that overwhelms them or bores them.  I can closely track student progress, engage in meaningful discussions about writing, and challenge students to stretch themselves.”

Students are part of the writing process from beginning to end.  Because of their high level of ownership and the direct, individualized feedback of their teacher, they invest more and learn more.  Working through multiple drafts, students quickly learn editing skills.  “My primary goal as a teacher is to structure an environment where learning is relevant, joyful, and rigorous,” says Bickford who shares his own writing with his students.  “Almost all my learning activities are based upon the higher-level skills we need to make our way through life:  analysis, judgment, synthesis, and evaluation.”

The Community School is a non-sectarian, private day school for boys and girls in grades 7 – 12, serving students from central New Hampshire and neighboring communities in Maine.  Bus transportation and financial aid are available.  Applications are currently being accepted.  To read some of the student essays and fiction written this year,  click on “student work.”  For more information or to schedule a tour of the school, call 323-7000.

Eleventh graders compose in the library

Raetha Stoddard reading 8th grader Ronnie's work

Richard Hendrick says about his presentation:

I will speak from a personal perspective about a journey from the son of Vietnam War-supporting Republican parents to a radical peacenik.  I will also talk about the role of the media in allowing and even promoting war.

Here is a bit on my background:   I was drafted at the end of my sophomore year because of an administrative error on the part of Princeton, where I was an undergraduate in Politics.  Because my brother was in Vietnam at the time, I was not sent there, but rather to Germany, where I worked in a Corps headquarters.  This army experience tended to radicalize me politically and when I returned to Princeton three years later, I participated in many anti-war demonstrations, including those which culminated in shutting the university down for the rest of the year in April of 1970.

I was admitted to the Doctoral program in Human Development at Harvard in 1976 and it was there, with the creators of Sesame Street, that I became interested in producing television for children.  I taught at Dartmouth for fifteen years, including courses in the effects of television on children and the society, how schools socialize children, how education serves the economic system, and a range of developmental psychology courses.  I was also producing television at this time and in the eighties wrote and produced the award-winning children’s series The Voyage of the Mimi (starring, incidentally, a young Ben Affleck).

I have produced documentaries for PBS, Turner, A&E and European television.  I am now raising money for a documentary on America’s military bases abroad.

I have continued my peace and human rights and environmental activism and am a member, as you know, of Veterans for Peace.