Tag: Education

When we talk about ‘fishing’ on Vinalhaven, most people think of catching lobsters, but in Port Clyde, fishing means more than that. A group of Vinalhaven students who are part of the Eastern Maine Skippers Program (EMSP) recently spent a day at Herring Gut Learning Center finding out about other fisheries and their place in the ocean food web.

High school.  Think piles of homework, jammed lockers, running late into class because you got lost, super competitive athletics, and the ever-intimidating seniors strolling the halls.  While it’s certainly not all like this, these are some of the images that we associate with high school, thanks to movies and stories we may have seen and heard.  In reality, the transition from middle school to high school is a time of marked change, which can be scary and intimidating to navigate, but exciting at the same time.  High school brings new freedoms and responsibilities, as well

For this year’s fall field trip, the Outer Islands TLC headed inland to the foothills of the White Mountains! This adventure brought us to the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School campus in Newry, Maine.

I teamed up with Green Fire Productions, a nonprofit video production company, to film classroom footage of John Van Dis of Edna Drinkwater School and Marci Train of Long Island School for the newest Ocean Frontiers documentary.

Last winter and spring, Figures of Speech Theatre worked with outer islands schools to produce a film. And it’s probably not like any film you’ve seen before.

What kind of school gets kids to build their own racecar? How about asking students to carry their trash around for a week? Or compare themselves to a favorite vegetable? Those are just a few of the student assignments I heard about at this year’s Island Teachers Conference, and they all have a common result: Students are diving deeper into their surroundings, and learning more along the way.

We want experiential and place-based education in our island and coastal schools! That was the common denominator among the 24 teachers, administrators and community partners who gathered in Bar Harbor in June.

The Outer Islands Teaching and Learning Collaborative has reached a milestone: the first class of students involved in the TLC are about to graduate high school. In March, they got to see each other for the first time in years.