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How NESS Implements US Sailing’s REACH Curriculum

NESS loves to provide the opportunity to sail with anyone who wants to learn, so what better way to get sailing than through school? Not only is sailing a great way to build lifelong skills such as teamwork, confidence, and leadership, but is also an educational experience! NESS educators use US Sailing’s REACH curriculum to guide our own sailing adventure programs.

What is REACH?

REACH is a curriculum that helps teach STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) principles through the unique platform of sailing. It is associated with National Education Standards (NES) in science and math, which is a second set of curriculum standards that NESS educators use to create quality programming. Research has even shown that REACH curriculum has helped participants increase their STEM based knowledge by 13%! We can teach students about STEM principles such as wind, buoyancy, sail area and perimeter, simple machines, and more in just one field trip!

How does NESS teach STEM?

How exactly do we teach STEM through sailing and marine science? In so many ways! Our educators can explore the physics lesson of simple machines through examining where you can find machines such as the lever, wheel & axel, inclined plane, pulley, wedge, and screw in sailing. As students learn about how weather impacts sailing through wind and waves, they discover the physics of wind lift and learn about how parts of the boat such as the sail, keel, and movement of sailboats use wind to function. Geometry is effortlessly incorporated into sailing!

Angles, area, and perimeter are all math concepts that our educators can discuss using our land sailor model and through students trying their own hand at sailing on our Opti trainers or Sonars! Not only are students learning, but they are learning through hands-on experiential learning and having fun at the same time!

Interested in getting your students out on the water? Check out https://nessf.org/educational-programs/

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72 Water Street, PO Box 733, Stonington, CT 06378 | 860.535.9362 | adventure@nessf.org