Check out the amazing program my friend Jeff Giallombardo is running at Nokomis High School in Newport, Maine (see below). It’s exciting to see bushcraft making inroads into the classroom.

“Ultimate Outdoors” is a program recently developedat Nokomis Regional High School in an effort to better serve our “at risk”young adult students and our general student population.

“Ultimate Outdoors” will serve our entire studentpopulation, but will specifically target students deemed at risk for academicfailure and dropout. The purposeof the program is to provide students who have had limited success academicallywith literacy skills, problem solving skills, self-confidence, and a sense ofschool pride and personal identity. The program will specifically emphasize theimportance literacy and academic achievement play in the pursuit of “outdoor” related fields. For example, careers in wildlife biology, forestry, professional hunting, fishing orrecreational guiding and game warden will be promoted among others.

Subjects will include hunting, fishing, trapping,camping, bushcraft, wildlife biology, botany, wildlife conservation, forestry,ecology and wilderness survival. The program will be split between traditional classroom time and handson field experience. By exposing our students to subjects we know are intrinsicallymotivating we will promote critical thinking skills and raise awareness andinterest in potential “outdoor” career fields. “Ultimate Outdoors” lessons and units will also incorporateelements of all core academic subjects such as English, Science, History,Mathematics and Physical Education.

Since we believe the learning process best occurswhen students are not solely passive recipients of information the class willbe based on experiential learning principals and research. We have developed a “read it, do it,write it” model of instruction for our topics of study.