Category: The Farm

Despite existing in a wooded hollow of Catoctin Mountain, ThorpeWood’s beauty and achievements still make themselves known down in Frederick. This month alone, our farm has received public recognition twice. First, on September 6th, the Frederick Non-Profit Alliance recognized the efforts of our lovely program director, Sam Castleman, at the Touching Lives Awards Breakfast, which Read More »

Each year, we seemingly get to spend more and more hours with our ‘friends’ at Head Start. This year for our summer visits, we doubled the amount of students coming to visit from 30 to 60! So, for each of twelve sessions over the course of July and August, we had our troop of preschoolers Read More »

Over the last few months, we find ourselves with quite a few new animals who warrant formal introductions. And so, we are pleased into introduce: Our Ladies! Heading back from a winter classroom visit this march, we stopped into H.C. Summers to admire their baby peeps – and ended up taking quite a few home! Read More »

Since previous blog posts cover the spring Head Start curriculum, this one will chronicle the wonderful and strange things overheard during these sessions: On Exploring (After seeing friend hop) “You’ll have to jump higher to get to the moon.” (Trying to convince me the woods are dangerous) “There’s BLOOD!” (Explaining to his friends why we shouldn’t Read More »

Last Wednesday was the Head Start end of year picnic in Frederick. As promised, we arrived with two trailer-fulls of fun. In the first, our horses, Vinur, Snuder, Geysir and Fandi, vied to be first down the trailer ramp, first to take a mouthful of Staley Park’s lush green grass. In the second trailer, the Read More »

New to our spring curriculum this year, nature art quickly became a favorite activity. Using the pine needles, sticks, acorn caps, and gumballs found during our exploration of the farm in lieu of paint brushes, the children created fantastic works of art unlike those created through more traditional means. Very often, they started out as Read More »

Undisturbed, the daffodils of our woods and fields would rise, shine, and fade back into dormancy until next spring like others of their species. At ThorpeWood, however, a seasonally introduced predator reinvents this usual lifecycle. This happens each time our teams of preschool explorers flood from their school buses and into our woods to hunt Read More »

With winter’s chill in the mountain air, the school buses stopped ferrying our preschool ‘friends’ between the Head Start classrooms and our farm. Not wanting them to forget their friendly farm people and animals, we took up our pens to write some letters, around 240 in fact. These notes were written inside folded colorful paper Read More »