One-room schoolhouse

For some town-dwellers, country schools might conjure up nostalgic images of a bygone age when live-in teachers used to instruct their pupils in the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic.

But for more than 1,000 Hi-Line students, the country school is still part of daily life. That's true here in Bear Paw School, a one-room school tucked into the northern edge of the Bear Paw Mountains, where six students finished out the school year this week, decorating their classroom to complement a thematic unit about life under the ocean.

The students each enjoy different things about where they go t...