You’ve never seen animal trophies quite like these–no taxidermy required! Chewonki Elementary and Middle School seventh- and eight-graders just finished using plaster, fabric, raffia, paper, paint, and other materials to create and mount the heads (and in some cases, bodies) of creatures from around the globe that are critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable to threats….
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Welcome Semester 64!
Blue sky, eager faculty, and fresh snow greeted arriving students on Wednesday, January 22, the first day of Maine Coast Semester 64. Parents and siblings helped unpack students’ belongings from cars while our workhorse Bob, with Farm Manager Megan Phillips at the reins, clopped back and forth between the parking lot and cabins, pulling wagon…
You’ve Got a Friend in ME – Introducing Our New Alumni & Friends Program
I’m excited to announce the launch of Chewonki’s new Alumni & Friends Program. This program will invigorate and centralize Chewonki’s efforts to connect with alumni and friends from all programs through reunions, regional events, strategic communications, and more. The purpose of this work is to provide a strong foundation for fundraising and enrollment activities and…
The Art and Science of the Field Journal
You can hold your phone in front of a fern and get an immediate plant i.d. Take your device into the forest at springtime, push a button to broadcast a cardinal’s song, and another cardinal will swoop into view. Type “turkey tail mushroom” into your browser and 21,100,000 results surface. So why sit for hours,…
We’re Counting Sheep!
It was a perfect day to stroll over to the farm and see what Megan Phillips and Lisa Beneman are up to…
Ho-Ho-Ho-liday Craft Fair
All of a sudden, it’s the season: time for the Chewonki Holiday Craft Fair! Makers of all ages sold one-of-a-kind gifts to the Chewonki community and the public at this year’s lively fair, which took place on Tuesday, December 10, in the Center for Environmental Education’s Chapin Hall. The youngest sellers were nine Chewonki Elementary…
Cetacean Curves
Maine Coast Semester math teachers Katie Curtis and Liz Burroughs had their precalculus students doing something fishy last week: calculating an equation to describe the curve of a pilot whale’s spine and then plotting points of the curve on a swath of graph paper. One student, Dylan Stachtiaris, went farther, using graphing software called Desmos…
A Few Maps of Home
Most of us, consciously or unconsciously, carry in our heads annotated maps of the places we love. Maine Coast Semester English teacher Sarah Rebick asked her “Literature and the Land” students each to make a map of “the place they think of as home,” she explains, at the start of Semester 63 in September. Those…
Our Favorite Books of 2019
We recently asked Chewonki faculty and staff to share their favorite books from the past year. Here’s our collective recommended reading list for 2019:
Exploring The Lobster Coast with Colin Woodard
In November, the award-winning author, journalist, and culture critic Colin Woodard joined us at Chewonki to speak to Maine Coast Semester students about Maine history and identity. He’s the perfect person to do it; he dissected Maine in his bestselling book The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier, exploring his…
