Students color, waiting for to get their faces painted.
Students enjoy a horse-drawn carriage ride.
Three-day-old baby dairy cow
Students have their faces painted by Mrs. Stagner (art teacher at Hamilton Central Schools).
By Lianna Mattingly
(Hamilton, Stockbridge, NY – Oct. 2014) The fourth annual Farm Days event was held at Hamilton Central this year with help from the Stockbridge Valley and other local organizations.
This event allows for students to get a hands-on experience with animals, local businesses and students from different grades where the younger children get to ask questions that maybe their teachers are not experts in, to be exposed to the vast opportunities there are in agriculture and understand things like apple production and aquaculture, where their teachers are unable to bring the more hands-on portion to their classroom, farm days is able to bring it right to the school.
Allowing students to walk around and tour the event allows for the creativity in a child’s mind to be more expressed than it would sitting at a desk. With the annual partnership Hamilton enjoys with Stockbridge, the number of attendees at this event grows greater every year. Farm Days is something that helps the children of our community establish what parts of the event they enjoy and encourages them to become involved in the future.
Some of the highlights at this year’s event were the aquaculture set-up with Professor Trotta from Morrisville State college, a segment about plant growth with New York Ag in the Classroom, everybody’s favorite – the horse-drawn carriage provided by Logan’s Place farm, face painting from HCS and Stockbridge’s art departments, animals (horses, goats, rabbits, cows and swans) and the importance of apple growth in New York state.
Hamilton Central School would again like to thank Stockbridge Valley and all other local businesses and volunteers for making this event possible again.