ISSUE #15

The Outdoor Insider

MAINE OUTDOOR SCHOOL'S QUARTERLY E-NEWSLETTER

ISSUE #15
JULY 2020

 

Maine Outdoor School exists because we believe that personal and community resilience 
in rural Maine is essential to the resilience of society as a whole. We believe that resilient,
flourishing communities are rooted in the careful study of our history and natural surroundings
by lifelong learners of all ages, backgrounds, and occupations.

Resilience Tip:
Outdoor learning could be a model for the reopening of schools 
(Learn more here.)

Several of the videos we produced this spring. Access them in the Tracks section below.

Co-Founders' Note:

These last three months have been challenging for all of us, to say the least. Just as we have all had to pivot our personal lives to ensure the health of our communities in the last few months, we at Maine Outdoor School have been pivoting our services to be able to continue providing needed outdoor education opportunities. For example, we transformed many of the in-person programs that were due to occur this spring into virtual options accessible and applicable to anyone with internet access, such as our new OWL-Outdoor Women Lead program series. Check out the Tracks section below for other examples and visit our new Virtual Programming page on our website to access these resources. 

For us, being able to spend time in nature this spring has been critical to our wellbeing. We are so privileged to live in a place where we have easy access to the outdoors, especially since just 20 minutes in a green space is enough to improve mental health. We made a pledge with Rethink Outside this spring because, like them,  we believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to enjoy time outdoors. We must bring the well-documented benefits of connections to the outdoors to everyone, regardless of geographic location, race, or economic status.

Spring is usually our busiest time of year, yet it couldn’t be this year due to Covid-19 and we lost some needed revenue as a result. If you believe in our work and helping us make our programs accessible, we invite you to donate here. Thank you for your support.
 

~Hazel and Joe

 

Tracks:

Please note that all videos listed below, while made for a particular student group or partner organization, were also designed to be useful to the public. We invite you to watch and share these videos--use them to inspire some outdoor fun and learning in your own backyard or local park or trail!

Check out the “MOS in the News” page on our website to see where we’ve shown up in the press!

 

Community Commendations:

This quarter’s community commendation goes to Zabet NeuCollins, Assistant Director of WHRL-Women for Healthy Rural Living, which recognizes the health benefits of spending time outdoors. Zabet gracefully pivoted with us to transform the Outdoor Women Lead (OWL) series into a virtual series, complete with videos and blog posts specific to female-identifying individuals. She has worked hard to edit the videos we film, start a Facebook group, and launch an impressive webpage to make this series accessible while physical distancing guidelines are in place. If you’re interested in developing your outdoor and naturalist skills or have questions about spending time outdoors as a female, check out the OWL webpage.

 

Photo by James St. John.

Biomimicry:

Photo by James St. John.

We’ve been hearing the trill of the gray tree frog a lot lately (listen here). These frogs range in size from just over an inch to as much as 2.5 inches. For such a small, elusive frog, their call is anything but elusive. The call of the gray tree frog is one of the loudest calls of all North American frogs. Individuals in a gray tree frog chorus will increase the rate of their calling to up to 1400 calls per hour! This routine uses a lot of energy; in fact, it uses more energy than just about any other activity of a cold-blooded animal. This singing is worth it, though, as the reproductive success of males is directly related to the number of nights they sing in a chorus and the females apparently like the fast calls the best.

Gray tree frogs remind us that even the smallest, hidden things can make the biggest impact, especially if they collaborate.

This Biomimicry feature is an excerpt from the weekly radio show Hazel and Joe produce for WERU-FM. You can read or listen to complete episodes here.

 

What's Upstream: 

This summer, with the support of Cobscook TREE and Milbridge Elementary School, we will be building and installing an outdoor chalkboard to complement the outdoor classroom space we built with Milbridge 6th-graders and Unity College volunteers in February.

We are once again able to offer in-person guided experiences, such as guided hikes and paddling adventures, following the latest Maine CDC guidelines. If you’d like to learn more about the outdoors in Downeast Maine, explore a new trail, or experience some nature observation games and activities with your kids, please get in touch with us with your goals and our Registered Maine Guides will customize a guided experience for you this summer.

New this summer: virtual tutoring via Zoom. A lot of learning is lost over the summer on a normal year! We are pleased to be able to support children in grades 5 and up with brushing up on science, language arts, or getting a head start on that college essay. Contact us FMI.

The OWL series will continue through the summer. Upcoming female-focused blog posts include:

  • Meeting your needs where there are no toilets (7/13)

  • Making “Scents” in the Outdoors: Hygiene Tips (8/10)

  • Outdoor Safety (9/14)

Additionally, upcoming OWL videos include:

  • Camping 101 (7/27)

  • Plant Identification (8/24)

  • Basic Canoe Skills (9/28)

We have always known about the many mental, physical, and academic benefits of outdoor school, but now we can add one more benefit: the ability to easily abide by Covid-19 physical distancing guidelines while learning. We are hopeful that we will be able to continue regular programming in local schools this fall, but there are still a lot of Covid-19-related unknowns in terms of school budgets and the budgets of our partnering organizations that have helped make our programs accessible to schools. If you want to ensure that a local school can access our programming, you can make a donation to us and let us know whether there’s a particular school you’d like it to go towards.

All MOS programs are fully customizable and suit learners of any age. Visit our website or contact us to learn more.