The Activities

Spring Street School is committed to exposing its students to a wide variety of learning experiences, including those that can only take place outside the classroom. Day trips, both on- and off-island, and longer trips, both within the United States and overseas, are an important part of a student's overall educational program. Every February, the school offers a program of "hands-on" classes to its middle school students called Winterim, and during the same time high school students have opportunities to travel or pursue areas of study now covered in the Spring Street School curriculum. Some of the rationale behind the school’s commitment to experiential education is given in the section below titled, "Principles of Experiential Learning"

In addition to adhering to the guidelines for student behavior established by the school, it is expected that students will meet the expectations of the places they visit. The school views this capacity to adapt to the expectations of a variety of communities as one of the measures of maturity. Eligibility to participate in a sequence of increasingly exciting activities is a privilege that students earn through their track record of appropriate behavior. Students may also take advantage of the opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities and sports available at the public schools. Such participation is subject to the rules and policies, including the co-curricular code, of the sponsoring public school.

Principles of Experiential Learning: Educators must recognize and encourage spontaneous opportunities for learning.

The Trips

Highschool

High school students have choices with respect to trips. Overseas trips begin with the Central America trip that is designed primarily for 9th and 10th graders; 11th and 12th graders may elect to go on the Asia trip. Both trips depart in early February. The Central America trip lasts for three weeks (the two weeks of Spring Street School’s Winterim and the mid-winter break), and students visit the Yucatan Peninsula and Belize. The Asia trip lasts for six weeks, and students travel to Thailand, India, Nepal and some fourth destination/country that is kept open for student input each year. This year, 21 students choose to participate in these trips. We have also offered trips to the Southwest during this time – a rock-climbing trip to Joshua Tree National Monument - and another that focused on the study of geology and Anasazi Indian culture, have been scheduled, as others may be in the future, in response to student interest and initiative in fund-raising.

Other high school students participate in the school’s Winterim program, which for high schoolers represents two weeks of supervised independent study in an area of interest identified by the students. Students pursue internships, home study, or self-designed field studies. Planned for next year’s non-traveling high school students will be a Sense of Place program designed to give students opportunities to study their own community, its environmental concerns, local culture and history, relationship to surrounding communities, etc.

Middle School

Ropes Course – All middle schoolers begin their year with a trip to a ropes course on Whidbey Island. This trip is designed to integrate the new sixth graders into the middle school and to create bonds of trust among them, and with participating staff. The students go through a day of personal and group initiative activities that are both fun and challenging.

6th grade – Sixth graders take two weeklong trips to Northwest parks and wilderness areas, one in the fall and a second in the spring. The fall trip has usually been a backpack trip to Lake Chelan. In the spring, they have gone to Ashland, Oregon, to see Shakespeare plays in addition to river rafting, and on a bike trip through the Gulf Islands in Canada.

7th grade – Seventh graders take a trip around the State of Washington to learn their Washington State History in the fall, and have joined our sixth graders on their spring trips.

8th grade – Eighth graders have a wilderness trip in the fall, usually to the Olympics, and in the spring they visit Washington D.C. and New York City in conjunction with their studies in American History. Some of the places they visit in the DC are: the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam War Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Smithsonian Museums, the Pentagon, the U.S. Congress, the White House, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and Williamsburg. In New York City, students visit: the United Nations, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the new