St. Lawrence Central students enjoy day of midyear fun, team-building

Jan. 31—BRASHER — St. Lawrence Central High School students enjoyed a day of midyear fun and team-building on Tuesday.

Throughout the day, they had an opportunity to interact with representatives from DiMarco Consulting Group, Sweethearts and Heroes, the Clarkson STEM program, Cornell Cooperative Extension, Mark A. Manske from Adirondack Raptors, and Len Mackey African Drumming.

Mr. Manske brought three owls for students to meet during his presentation. He provided background information on owls and gave students the opportunity to hold one of them.

"Their vision is so good they can spot a rabbit in the brush barely moving a mile away," he said.

The students had a chance to hold Pugsley, an 8-year-old small eastern screech owl whose retina was detached in her left eye, leaving her blind in that eye.

"She got hit by a car down in West Virginia six, seven years ago," Mr. Manske said.

Winter brings a lack of food for eastern screech owls, he said. All the insects owls like Pugsley eat are dormant, mice are buried under the snow, smaller songbirds have gone south.

"She would die a horrible death, so I have to keep her. Spring, summer or fall, they would do just fine," Mr. Manske said. "She's always watching me. She hates me. She thinks I'm that big ogre that's keeping her and won't let her go."

Winnie came to him from Tupper Lake, where she had been hit by a car.

"She can't fly anymore. She flaps her wings. She goes through all the motions, but she can't actually maintain lift. She can't fly. She'd end up dead," he said.

A few rooms away, Len E. Mackey was leading students in a drum presentation. The theory behind the drum beats, he said, is "to come together and play together."

"That's why we're here today, this fine day — to come together, to play together," he said.

In the auxiliary gymnasium, students were lined up side by side and held dowels tied to a twisted rope attached to a pole. The idea was to untwist the rope by passing the dowels to each other.

"The whole idea is to teach team-building and communication skills. We try and make it harder and harder," said Chip Morris from the DiMarco Consulting Group, Potsdam.

For the first attempt, students were allowed to talk and move, but couldn't hand the dowel to another student.

"Then they couldn't talk and couldn't move, but they could hand off the dowel. So, they had to figure out as a team how to communicate," Mr. Morris said. "This group did it pretty fast. Some groups, they get through one or two of them. This group's going to get through three or four of them."

Leigha Gagner from the Clarkson Institute for STEM Education was presenting to another group of students using vehicles made from Legos which had to move independently from one part of the room to another.

"They're working through the engineering process. They figure out the problems and come up with a solution" by modifying the vehicle, she said. "It's just building a Lego structure today, but they're solving real-world problems."

Meanwhile, other students were learning about embryology, the study of eggs, and dairy with presentations by Malorie Jordan and Carmen Hostetter from the Cornell Cooperative Extension. And in the main gymnasium, John Hammill from the DiMarco Consulting Group had another team-building activity going on. Students were stationed along a polygon on the floor and had to move items from a bucket at one end of the polygon to another bucket at the other end. All team members had to touch the item, but they couldn't pass it to the student at their immediate left or right.

The representatives from each organization are back in the district on Wednesday, as middle school students get their opportunity to also enjoy a day of fun.