Self-portrait in the Land

Draw or paint a landscape self-portrait of yourself - depict your town with all the local landmarks, geographical or architectural, that represent you. If I were to paint a landscape painting that represents me I would include the mountains because I love hiking, the school I used to work at, my house, the hospital where my son was born, the grocery store where I get my food, the library where we go to storytime, the beach, an airplane because that connects me to my family back East etc...  Extensions for the lesson include having the students guess who's painting is whose and writing a key explaining what  each landmark is and why it was included.

Richard Louv

"An environment-based education movement--at all levels of education--will help students realize that school isn't supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world." 

~ Richard Louv, Author of Last Child in the Woods & the Nature Priciple

 

Local Fare

In the home or classroom: make a meal of traditional local fare. Research why it is a favorite in your neck of the woods, where the ingredients come from. Is it a favorite because there exists a concentration of people from a certain nationality in your area, is the produce grown or harvested there or does it grow naturally? 

Cooking is such a great learning opportunity to involve your children in concepts such as volume, measurement, fractions, states of matter, physics and chemistry can be experienced in context. Not to mention they also get to take in sensory information, use descriptive language and just have good old fashioned family fun!

 

 

John Dewey

John Dewy, though not credited with creating the idea of place-based ed, certainly inspired and paved the way for it.


"Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife."
  
"Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself."

"From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school, its isolation from life. When the child gets into the schoolroom he has to put out of his mind a large part of the ideas, interests, and activities that predominate in his home and neighborhood. So the school, being unable to utilize this everyday experience, sets painfully to work, on another tack and by a variety of means, to arouse in the child an interest in school studies."

"... the great waste in school comes from the child’s inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while at the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school."


~ John Dewey

Standards

“So the question, again, is not if we ‘need’ standards in our schools but with what sensibilities we navigate between the two extremes of regimented learning with destructive overtones, on one side, and pedagogic aimlessness and fatuous romanticism on the other.” 

Deborah Meier, Will Standards Save Public Education?, 2000

Steiner & Waldorf

I always find great inspiration when reading the writings of Rudolf Steiner, founder of Waldorf Education.

"If a child has been able to play, to give up his whole, loving being to the world around him, he will be able in the serious tasks of later life to devote himself with power and confidence to the service of the world."

"Receive the children in reverence; educate them in love; let them go forth in freedom." 

~ Rudolf Steiner

Recess - The Ultimate Classroom

A recent article had me riled up, " Tuesday's Wake Up Call! Are your schools cutting back on recess?"

Sometimes the only place-based ed. kids get is at recess! Free play is so important to the mind and the morale of a child. Before I left the classroom to stay home with my family for a few years, I worked at a Title 1 school. It wasn't making AYP for a myriad of reasons. One of the knee jerk reactions was to cram more kids into the after school program, but not give them a recess in between regular school and their extended day. The behavior problems that factor alone created made the program so much LESS effective then it could have been, This is a huge problem in under privileged schools. We take away the things that are most enjoyable and then wonder why the drop out rate is so high!