Merlin Club
Merlin Club is a creative and ever-changing program for 6,7, and 8 graders at the Troy Howard Middle School in Belfast. It’s a hybrid program involving one hour during the school advisory period and a 2.5-hour after-school encounter each month.
​
The mission: to foster understanding and love for nature through experiential learning opportunities integrating science, math, art, and literacy and to build a sense of belonging with each other, of knowing our place in the web of the human and more-than-human world.
​​Twice a month the students meet to learn about whatever they choose. Once, in early fall, it was mushrooms. They looked at mushroom gills, pores, and other means of identification, they drew images fungi, and they made shiitake mushroom logs to take home. In late fall, they built the “Hemlock Loop,” a campus trail, worked on evergreen tree identification, and drank cedar tea.
The club is the brainstorm of volunteers—one of many efforts resulting from the Penobscot Bay Stewards program. Collaborating THMS teacher Kathleen Gass shepherds the group.
​
​
Why do we do this? One way—maybe the best way—to preserve the watershed is to help people, especially young people, appreciate the watershed and learn how to learn more about it. At the Merlin Club, kids engage hands on, minds open, with the environment at hand. Curious? Want to help? Contact us >
