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There’s no better time at Harpswell Community School than a Wednesday afternoon as the school year draws to a close.
Bottle rockets shoot across the sky as students race in pursuit, giggling with hands outstretched in an attempt to catch them as they fall.
Kids hold tiny compasses, turning left, right and left again across the grass.
On the other side of the campus, children are climbing trees, building a bench and sliding down a hill in an inflatable canoe.
For four weeks in May and June, community volunteers bring their skills to the elementary school at 2:30 p.m. each Wednesday to offer students hands-on learning opportunities.
“There’s a lot to learn outside of school,” Harpswell Community School Principal Anita Hopkins said.
The program started before Hopkins became principal eight years ago.
“Each child has their own kind of interest,” she said. The mini courses allow students to expand on those existing interests and discover new ones.
The courses change every year. Lobstering has been popular in years past. Although it wasn’t offered this year, Hopkins said it is important because HCS has many students who will go on to work on the waterfront.
Some of this year’s courses included bottle rockets, big trucks, carpentry, Harpswell history, acting, map and compass, and outdoor adventure and preparedness. Each student picks one course.
Cossette Graves, 9, chose map and compass this year, learning how to read a map and navigate with a compass — while enjoying her peers’ exploits just as much.
“We would watch the bottle rocket kids just sprint at a rocket, topple people over. It was hilarious,” Cossette said.
Fifth grader Rory Mason, 11, was in the bottle rockets course. His favorite part, he said, was when he and a classmate “launched my rocket at 100 psi with a bike pump” and “got it 189 feet in the air.”
The Fun with Foods course is so popular it was reserved for fifth graders.
“I want the kids to be able to go home and say, ‘Mom, I’ll cook dinner tonight,’ or ‘I’ll make lunch,’ or ‘I can make cookies,’ and, you know, they do!” said Lou Piccone, the volunteer who has led the class for three years.
He said it is fun and gratifying to hear the kids’ stories, knowing he was the one who taught them to cook.
Piccone is a contractor and works weekends as a preserve monitor for the Harpswell Heritage Land Trust, but he loves to cook and used to think about opening his own restaurant. His father is from Italy. As a child, he would visit his extended family almost every summer.
His aunt, grandmother and great-aunt taught him simple, practical ways of cooking, he said, and he passes those methods along to his students.
“I think this is the time in their lives when … the seeds are planted for what they love and what they want to do,” Piccone said. “So you never know — it could start right here.”
