CHESTERTOWN — Radcliffe Creek School’s makerspace has been brought back, along with the school’s longtime tradition of teaching its students the art of wooden boatbuilding, thanks to grant support from area foundations.
The space, which sat empty for years following challenges from the COVID pandemic, is once again abuzz with the sounds of saws and sanders as community boatbuilders teach woodworking skills to RCS students, leading them through the process of building a wooden skiff.
A grant from the Samuel and Margaret Gorn Foundation, dedicating a new STEM workshop within the space, as well as funding from the Dock Street Foundation to support the boatbuilding program, has made it possible for Radcliffe Creek School to begin offering a new course, “STEM to Stern: Boatbuilding 101,” to a group of sixth, seventh and eighth graders during a weekly after-school program.
Two community volunteers, Joe Smith and John Henderson, are bringing decades of wooden boatbuilding experience, along with a passion for teaching STEM concepts such as physics and arithmetic, to their teaching role.
STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.
“As an educational experience or a lifetime fascination, wooden boatbuilding combines learning about the properties of wood, gaining facility with tools, and applying math and science to understand and predict performance,” Henderson said in a news release.
Along the way, he said, “we acquire an appreciation for accuracy, the perseverance to work through the details, and the ability to overcome inevitable frustrations.”
Using a boat design from the Alexandria Seaport Foundation, students are cutting pieces from wood and assembling them, along with materials from Chesapeake Light Craft, as they learn to build, paint and finish a 12-foot wooden skiff.
The project is expected to last three months.
“By the time the boat is finished, students will have visited a lumber mill to see how trees become boards, cut wood to dimensions shown on drawings, drilled pilot holes for the screws that hold the boat together, spread epoxy adhesive to make the boat strong and watertight, painted the whole boat and added varnished seats and rub rails,” Smith said in the news release.
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Radcliffe Creek School is a K-8 private school in Chestertown that focuses on students with learning differences.
