Students have been out in the world this fall, engaging with local history, ecology, and the environment around them. Recent field trips included visits to Ocean View Cemetery in Wells, the Nathaniel Lord Mansion, and Old York Historical Society — part of our Local Haunts course exploring how stories, place, and people shape our shared past.
Outdoor education has also taken center stage, with classes spending time in the woods and on local trails to practice shelter-building, environmental observation, and nature journaling. These experiences connect academic learning with creativity, teamwork, and problem-solving — all core parts of The New School’s approach.
A quick recap of what we’ve been doing, just this past October:
Earlier this month, we visited the Seashore Trolley Museum to strengthen our community connections, learn a bit about history, and to have fun. At the museum, we saw the Kennebunk/Kennebunkport/Arundel Alumni Association’s display, which was designed and constructed with the help of Susan, our office manager, in her role as a KKAAA board member.
Mid-month, our Wild Wellness: Foraging & Survival Shelter Building class headed down to Mother’s Beach here in Kennebunk to collect sea water. We’re using science to filter out sea salt for a future project.
As part of the Local Haunts class in the latter part of the month, our students have been to Ocean View Cemetery in Wells, down to York to visit the Old York Historical Society, and to the Arundel Cemetery (located in Kennebunkport). The students walked to nearby Mount Pleasant Cemetery (just up the road a block or two towards Wells) to take rubbings from grave markers and tombstones.
The class headed to the Brick Store Museum, where the staff organized a brief version of their popular All Souls’ Walk (the full version was held the weekend before Halloween, their 22nd year of the event), where actors in Kennebunk’s Hope Cemetery’s Old Church Yard section played the roles of some of our communities’ historic figures.
Ellie’s Wild Wellness: Foraging & Survival Shelter Building class had our students head into the woods to build two survival shelters. (It’s in the name of the class, folks.) Our upper class cohort worked on an A-Frame shelter while our lower class students built a lean-to. We worked through the early afternoon drizzle and wound up back on campus in time for dismissal!
And Sela travelled to New Mexico as part of her senior project, but you can read all about that in her Senior Project Spotlight!
