Shearing knowledge at Farm School
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BY MARGARET REIST/Lincoln Journal Star
Up a long driveway, near the horses and the big red barn, in a sturdy building nestled in the hilly countryside west of Denton, all eyes are on a small metal box.
The question at hand: What’s inside?
“Sheep?” suggests a voice from the group sitting on the blankets spread out on the concrete machine shed floor.
No, too small. Sheep aren’t that little.
“Wool?” suggests another voice.
Hmmm. How about picking up the box, suggests the lady up front, the one who, quite clearly, already knows what’s in there.
“Is it heavy or light?”
Someone steps up and grabs the well-worn green metal container.
Heavy. Definitely heavier than wool.
“What’s this word?” asks the lady up front, holding up a white flash card.
“Clippers,” comes the chorus sitting on the blankets.
And they’ve answered the question, one that has great meaning this sunny morning because those very clippers are going to shear a sheep.
Sheep, which might be ewes or rams or maybe a lamb, and which bleat and whose wool contains lanolin, which is a hard word that maybe Grandpa Elmer can define — later, in the barn, with the sheep and the clippers.
The day before, this group — 28 kids from the kindergarten through second grade — learned about dairy cows. Holsteins.
Throughout last week on this farm, they learned about all sorts of other things, too, from shoeing a horse to making butter.
They rode horses and they worked with wood. They fished goldfish out of the horse’s water tank and they built a bridge across a small creek that runs across the land. They hoed a garden and they practiced their roping skills on a hay bale with a plastic bull’s head attached.
In other words, they were learning, at a Bright Lights program called Farm School that took place last week.
The farm comes equipped with a veteran teacher named Jeanette Maas, who not only knows about shearing clippers in metal boxes but about kids, because she’s spent the last 43 years teaching kindergartners at Pyrtle Elementary.
She and her husband Roger bought the farm 33 years ago and for years, she’s been bringing her students here, giving each kindergarten class a chance to ride a horse and get a taste of farm life.
About eight years ago, she started offering a summer program to some Pyrtle kids, but when the grant ran out two years later, so did the summer school program.
Then about five years ago, she began offering the weeklong farm school through the Bright Lights summer program.
There are at least eight other adults with Maas every day — volunteers who are the heart of the Bright Lights program, Maas said. Along with the teachers who help out are her husband Roger, Grandpa Elmer Kunz, a neighbor, and Michael, her oldest son, who manned the shearing clippers.
As Michael finishes this Thursday morning and the sheep look much cooler, each student gets a handful of wool to make their own sheep with a piece of paper, some markers and glue.
As Lupe Jenkins puts the finishing touches on her sheep, the 7-year-old from Randolph Elementary says she enjoys the art out here on the farm. And the songs. And, among all the animals — the kittens and the goats and the sheep and the cows and the horses — she likes the horses the best.
“It’s just amazing to me how many kids have not seen an animal in person before,” says Natasha Kvasnicka, Maas’ niece, who volunteers. “They get so excited. That’s the best. By the end of the week they’re all pros and they have to teach their parents.”
Tish Rezac, a teacher whose own kids enrolled in Farm School and now come with her to help, said kids gain self-confidence trying new things. That’s worth the trip from Lincoln.
“It’s just those little ah ha’s they have when they realize they can do something,” she said. “The self-confidence is just something you can’t put a price tag on.”
Liam McChristian, a 7-year-old from Kahoa Elementary, is lacking no self-confidence when it comes to exploring.
“You know what my favorite thing to do at plan-do time is? To go in the hay (loft).”
For those not up on Farm School lingo, plan-do time is the point in the morning when students can visit any number of “stations,” from fishing to horseback riding to bridge-building down at the creek.
And, if you’re Liam McChristian and you can find an adult, you can climb the ladder into the blackness above the barn, where in the winter Roger Maas stores the hay for his horses.
Now, though, it’s an empty place full of cobwebs and a few tiny little kittens curled up in straw — and Liam, who’s walking from end to end swiping at the cobwebs.
This is learning the hands-on way. Granted, there’s some traditional sorts of stuff hidden amongst the kittens and the goats and the headbutting sheep named Lester.
Vocabulary is big at Farm School (words like ewe and ram and lanolin). And every day students write about their favorite activities in a journal that includes pictures of them at work (and play).
But things just happen, too. Lessons that grow up from the ground and nuzzle small hands with soft noses.
One year, students turned a bumper crop of mulberries into pie, Maas said. Another year, there were enough pumpkins that everyone could take one home.
Kids walk into the woodworking station and walk out with boats nobody told them to make, but that float, nonetheless, on the water above the goldfish.
At the end of the week, when the parents come out, they’ll be able to peruse the sheep pictures. They’ll wander through the dirt and grass down to the creek to see the bridge.
And, if they’re curious, just about anyone under the age of 8 can tell them that lanolin is the oil that comes from the sheep’s wool.
They know, because they ran their fingers through it.
Reach Margaret Reist at 473-7226 or mreist@journalstar.com.
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