Mrs. Lima’s Personal Fitness class has been taking advantage of the good weather and has been holding its strength training class outdoors.
Every day the students warm up and cool down by moving their equipment to and from their classroom tent.
On Tuesday, each student paired up with a classmate who lifts the same amount of weight. The pairs completed three rounds of an upper-body free weight circuit using barbells, dumbbells, and weight benches.
Students in the Aesthetics and Ideas class, which is co-taught by Jason Lambert and Ben Putnam, welcomed a guest speaker from the MacDowell artist's residency program on Thursday.
Chana Porter is an emerging playwright, speculative novelist, and education activist. According to the New York Times, Porter “uses incongruity and exaggeration to suggest some midnight-dark truths about human life and endeavor.”
Porter talked to the class about her work and her own educational pathway. Her most recent work is the novel The Seep (2020), a unique alien invasion story that focuses on the human element and the myriad ways in which we see, and do not see, our own world. She spent time working with students on a series of writing prompts and shared some techniques and methods to help us focus and get out of our way when trying to create.
Porter received her undergraduate degree from Hampshire College before undertaking non-residential graduate studies at Goddard College so she could continue to devote time to writing. Her current interest is the development of a screenwriting project in Los Angeles.
Porter's plays have been developed or produced at New Georges, Playwrights Horizons, The Catastrophic Theatre, La MaMa, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, Cherry Lane, The Invisible Dog, and Movement Research.
Porter is also the co-founder of the Octavia Project, a free summer writing and STEM program for Brooklyn teenage girls and non-binary youth. She has taught her embodied creativity course Writing from the Body at the University of Houston, Fordham University, Hampshire College, Goddard College, Weber State, and with Sarah Lawrence’s Global Classroom.
Mrs. Cooper’s AP Language students presented their Name-Drop assignments to their classmates this week.
Inspired by the advice of writer Annie Dillard, “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment,” each student explored the works of a particular, famous creative person to determine that artist’s astonishment.
This could be any recurring theme, stylistic technique, or something that fascinated the artist. The artists whom the students investigated and their astonishments included:
Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift (vivid storytelling)
Film director and producer Steven Spielberg (childhood)
Rapper and record producer Kanye West (Christianity)
President Barack Obama (speech cadence and stage presence)
Ballerina Anna Pavlova (light yet expressive pieces)
YouTuber Jake Paul (the importance of being well behaved and having good manners)
Do you have shoes, sneakers, and boots you are looking to get rid of?
ConVal Community Dollars for Scholars will be running a shoe drive from Monday, October 4 to Wednesday, November 17.
We will be collecting gently worn, used, and new shoes of all kinds at ConVal High School in the box that is located in the main office!
Collection sites are also available at Great Brook Middle School, South Meadow Middle School, and Bellows-Nichols Insurance Agency in Peterborough. We will also be at Shaw's in Peterborough on Saturday, October 9 and 16 from 9:30am-2:30pm.
We are working with Funds2Orgs that then distributes these shoes to micro-entrepreneurs in developing countries to help them create, maintain and grow small businesses.
Our goal is to collect 50 bags with 25 pairs of shoes per bag! All money raised from this fundraiser will help us to award scholarships to those who have faced life challenges and demonstrate a financial need.
So clean out your closets and make a difference locally and globally. Thank you!
Chris Heider (cheider@conval.edu) and Rebecca Dunn (rdunn@conval.edu) serve on the Board of Directors for ConVal Community Dollars for Scholars and are happy to answer any questions you might have.
As part of their unit on cars in German 4, Frau Hodgdon's students went into the student parking lot at ConVal High School to practice an important skill: "den Ă–lstand messen," to check the oil level.
Everything had to be done in German and to give you a sense of what the instructions were, here is a sample:
"1. Um den Ă–lstand korrekt zu messen, sollte der Motor warm sein. Warten Sie nach dem Abstellen des Motors aber ein wenig, damit das Ă–l sich komplett in der Ă–lwanne sammeln kann.
2. Die meisten Autos haben einen Ölmessstab, um den Ölstand zu prüfen. Dafür Haube öffnen und den Ölmessstab herausziehen. Wo er bei Ihrem Auto sitzt, entnehmen Sie ggf. der Bedienungsanleitung. (Achtung: Manche moderne Autos haben keinen Messstab mehr, hier wird der Ölstand über den Bordcomputer abgerufen).
3. Ă–lmessstab mit einem fusselfreien Stoff- oder Papiertuch reinigen und ihn wieder komplett (!) in die entsprechende Ă–ffnung einfĂĽhren.
4. Ă–lmessstab erneut herausziehen.
5. Mithilfe der Markierungen ablesen, ob der Ă–lstand richtig ist: Auf dem Messstab sind der minimale und maximale Ă–lstand vermerkt, der Ă–lfilm sollte mindestens bis zur Mitte zwischen den beiden Markierungen (eher in Richtung Max-Strich) reichen, keinesfalls aber darunter oder darĂĽber liegen."
Over a two-day period, students in Mr. Stetzer's Biology class conducted an assessment of Freshman Pond as part of their study of ecology and ecosystems.
The first day was devoted to a chemical analysis of the water quality. On the second day, students sampled for macroinvertebrates.
"In the end, we are comparing the tested elements of water quality — the chemical testing — with species richness, i.e. the amount of critters we found," said Stetzer. "We want to see if Freshman Pond is a vibrant ecosystem, or if it’s one with little diversity."
Frau Hodgdon's German 4 class recently had a unique learning opportunity, thanks to an initiative by the German Goethe Institute and PASCH, Germany's "Schools: Partners for the Future" program.
Live-linked via Zoom to engineers and app developers in Germany, students learned to code — in German — Calliope mini-computers using the Open Roberta® Lab app creation software.
ConVal High School was one of just three schools across the nation to receive class sets of Calliope mini computers. The Roberta® open source development platform uses drag-and-drop instructions which allow students to put together complex programming steps in an intuitive and easy-to-execute way.
Students in the Aesthetics and Ideas class, which is co-taught by Jason Lambert and Ben Putnam, welcomed a guest speaker from the MacDowell artist’s residency program on Thursday.
Chana Porter is an emerging playwright, speculative novelist, and education activist. According to the New York Times, Porter “uses incongruity and exaggeration to suggest some midnight-dark truths about human life and endeavor.”
Mrs. Cooper’s AP Language students presented their Name-Drop assignments to their classmates this week.
Inspired by the advice of writer Annie Dillard, “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment,” each student explored the works of a particular, famous creative person to determine that artist’s astonishment.
As part of their unit on cars in German 4, Frau Hodgdon’s students went into the student parking lot at ConVal High School to practice an important skill: “den Ă–lstand messen,” to check the oil level.
Everything had to be done in German and to give you a sense of what the instructions were, here is a sample:
Over a two-day period, students in Mr. Stetzer’s Biology class conducted an assessment of Freshman Pond as part of their study of ecology and ecosystems.
The first day was devoted to a chemical analysis of the water quality. On the second day, students sampled for macroinvertebrates.
“In the end, we are comparing the tested elements of water quality — the chemical testing — with species richness,
Frau Hodgdon’s German 4 class recently had a unique learning opportunity, thanks to an initiative by the German Goethe Institute and PASCH, Germany’s “Schools: Partners for the Future” program.
Live-linked via Zoom to engineers and app developers in Germany, students learned to code — in German — Calliope mini-computers using the Open Roberta® Lab app creation software.
