Helping Around the House

Helping Grandpa fix the toy tractor.

While I focus a lot of energy on free play and outdoor play on the Facebook page, the basis of Taiga Teacher has always been place-based education. The idea that teaching is highly effective when local concepts and examples are employed to build understanding of broader, more global concepts. A microcosm/macrocosm type of scaffolding, drawing upon a learner's prior knowledge to make connections to the new information being passed on. In the simplest form - teaching in context and bringing learning back to the real world. Since we are talking about place, what hits home more than HOME!

There is so much being touted about free play. My favorite benefit being that it enables children to be better goal setters and promotes their ability to self actualize. I see a trend, as disturbing as the elimination of play in the academic setting - the elimination of children helping their parents with household chores. One of the most fertile grounds for learning is at home. We live in such a fast paced world, with so many obligations. Parents often barely have enough time to load the dishwasher or mow the lawn between work, soccer games, book clubs etc... Often chores are rushed and parents feel they don't have time to slow down and include the child. It is true that a child might make the task take twice as long, but the benefits are HUGE!

Helping Grandma lead the donkey into the barn.

I've read quite a few parenting books in my 5.5 years on the job and one of the suggestions just about every resource I've come across is to engage children in the household tasks. It may be painful at times, especially when they are little and developing both their fine and gross motor skills, but such activities are exactly for just that purpose... developing their skills, both physical and mental. When kids help with the chores they learn process skills... how to see something through from beginning to end. They feel empowered and engaged. Most negative behavior based on my research and experience is because children are grappling for control - control of their feelings, their physical surroundings, their bodily functions, their thoughts, their belonging... When we invite them to join us and show them we trust them enough to be involved and that everything takes work, practice and patience we are giving them an enormous gift!

Learning in context:

Making pie crust.

Simple chores such as emptying the dishwasher has kids sorting items: forks, spoons, knives, small plates and big. Helping wash the dishes teaches physics, properties and tendencies of water and chemistry- mixtures and chemical reactions. Cooking too introduces many chemistry concepts, as well as measurement, states of matter, and even culture. Helping dad with the car teaches not only mechanics, but physics, and sheds light to the behind the scenes life all manufactured objects have. Every task from harvesting food from the garden to sweeping the deck or shoveling the snow has a lesson if you take the time to appreciate it. This goes for our toddlers to our highschoolers.

Opportunities to build on knowledge are always found embedded in tasks. Cleaning windows is a chance to build rich vocabulary - discuss what transparent means and what the opposite of that is. Discuss why Dawn dish soap cuts through grease and how it is used to help clean animals after an oil spill. If you don't know yourself, research it. Showing your child how you learn is a precious a gift. There's always an opportunity waiting to be harnessed!

Opportunity to connect:
Chores also provide a time to talk with your child while the attention is not on them or you, but on the task at hand. It's a good time to discuss what is going well and to troubleshoot other parts of life that aren't going so hot, for example left over feelings from a big transition such as a move.

Healthy Risk Taking:
The other huge benefit of household chores is learning to take healthy risks in a supportive, safe environment. By risk I don't mean letting my 2 year old put the knives away when unloading the dish washer. I take those out first. My older son often volunteers to do chores I often wonder if he's capable of taking on at his age, for instance one day when he was 4 he wanted to help vacuum the house, despite the stand up machine being taller than him. He attempts these tasks and makes his own decision if he is in over his head, capable of carrying on, or he asks for help, another skill I encourage in my children and hope they take into their adulthood. The humble ability to know when they need help and the ability to feel secure enough with themselves to ask. On this particular occasion he assessed that he couldn't wrangle the contraption on his own and decided he would just use the hose attachment and do the edges and corners like he had observed me doing before.

Risk taking is a monumental and often overlooked part of academic life. A child who is afraid to take healthy risks can be debilitated in the classroom. Risk taking happens almost every moment in life. A simple example would be a child coming across a new word they've never seen before and making the leap to either trust themselves to figure it out using the context clues, sounding it out or throwing up their hands. When a child takes risks, they are trusting themselves to try something new. The crucial component in this is knowing that making a mistake is ok and a valuable part of the learning process. Letting kids make mistakes and learn from them with out intervening is challenging, but so necessary. It tells them you have faith they are smart enough to figure it out. "I told you so" can prohibit anyone from trying further. Celebrating a child's attempt with a phrase like "That was wonderful how you turned off the water and figured out how to keep it in the sink!" Allowing yourself to face the unknown is a finely honed skill that can lead to big life altering events like taking a leap and applying for a dream job, buying a house, sending a book you wrote to the publisher, starting a business or choosing a major in college. You won't do it if you don't trust yourself or do not feel supported, no matter the outcome.

Imagine how much more they can help out when they are older if they learn to help out early. How responsible they will be....

Outdoor Preschool Group

We have been fortunate to join an amazing group of welcoming families involved in an Outdoor Preschool. This group meets weekly at the same location, no matter the weather, throughout the year. The format of every meeting is: begin with a greeting song, hike down the trail to the story knoll (about .25 mile), read a book (the story knoll is under the cover of some large fir trees so it is dry even on rainy days and there are fallen trees that provide seating), a little further hike to beach (another .25 mile) picking huckleberries & blueberries in season, at the beach parents often make a fire and roast hotdogs, snacks are shared. there is an island that at low tide is accessible by a tombolo, trees along the beach provide as great shelter against the wind and precipitation. Tide pools are also accessible at low tide. In the summer salmon can be seen splashing around, with seals bobbing up in down in search of them and curious as to what the kids are doing. We've only been here about 2 months, and haven't seen it ourselves, but whales can be seen in the cove too! Last week the kids spotted and caught a wood frog they only slightly terrified and gently put back after they scrutinized him.

I've participated and even started groups similar to this, but with less structure. The key to picking a good places to regularly meet is choosing one that has options such as protection from the canopy of the forest. Meeting in the same location every time is a a great way to learn about place intimately through the seasons and all the changes it cycles through.

I love how welcoming and accessible this group is. Its future is a little shaky right now. The moms who originally started it a couple of years ago, now have kids that have moved on to elementary school, but the torch has been carried on by a few other parents. The mama who has recently been carrying on has her kiddos moving into the school world this fall and no one has picked up the baton yet. I would, but I'm being good to myself and my family, by not over stretching myself. I will gladly help where I can though.

Sunday Morning Science

A few plastic links borrowed from the baby, some twine, a loft and a pair of boots provided today's science experiment.

This is a snippet of our experiments with pulley systems today. My husband and son experimented with creating different pulleys, measuring the ratio between the amount of string it takes to pull a pair of boots and some other items 1 foot, discussing and playing with the weight to string(s) ratio.

Content Areas & Standards:
      Science - simple machines, physics, leverage, scientific process
      Math - measurement, ratios
      Language Arts - vocabulary

Tree Journals and ONE place

The turn around point on my regular running trail in Kodiak.

When I had my 3rd and 4th grade multi-age classroom in Fairbanks. I was in teacher paradise. I was in a Title 1 school, but was given a lot of freedom and autonomy to do what I felt best for my students. Part of that was an amazing administrator who knew I had a different situation teaching two grades, but also one who believed in multi-age and allowed me to make the decisions I needed to to make it truly work. I learned so much about my students having them for two years. I came to understand the breadth of the learning process. I also was challenged with creating new projects and approaches. You can not get in a rut when you teach multi-age like you can with a straight grade. Things have to be new and fresh each year because a large portion of your class you had the year before. One thing you can do is take a format that the kids know from one year and apply it to the next to allow them comfort and the ability to go deeper with their curiosity and study.

The first year I had my multi-age we did Moon Journals. The second year, the plant life cycle was part of our curriculum. We did Tree Journals. Students adopted a tree and observed it over the course of  the school year. They drew about it, wrote about their observations, documented what they learned about trees and plants in general. One of my favorite things that came out of the year long study of trees was "Tree Movies." We had great big beautiful windows in our classroom that looked out to the trees lining the Noyes Slough that ran by the school. When students noticed the trees dancing in the wind, or the alpenglow on the frost of the trees at sunrise (late morning in the winter in Fairbanks) they would ask me to shut of the lights and we would quietly watch the "Tree Movie." A wonderful break in our busy routine and a communal experience of appreciation for the beauty of nature, remembering there was more to life than what remained inside the four walls of the classroom or the math problem in the workbook.

Study one tree, one place or one trail is important. We live in a culture where conquering is so important. Even people who spend much of their lives outdoors like to have conquests in the form of Peak Bagging or seeing as much of the world as they can. This is important, but just as important is getting to know one place well. My husband thinks it's funny that I like to run the same trail all the time. The only change is adding distance. I do this for many reasons... running the same course I know my body better and how much faster I can go, how much more I can push myself each time, but also I love noticing the weather patterns by seeing the sky from the same place over and over. I love seeing the same trail at different times of the day and noticing the subtle changes of the season from run to run. I enjoy walking the same trail and seeing things I totally missed when running by. I've known many places in my life by the trails I frequented. I mark milestones in my life by the way those trails looked as I traveled down them, processing the information from the day. One of the important things we owe our children is how to relate to spaces. Giving them the opportunity to get to know them intimately, deeply with out pushing them to keep moving on. At the same time we need to let them find that space. Plopping them down and telling them to love a place won't work. They need to choose the tree, trail, land, and..... decide when to move on... if they need to.

I think of a man I heard about once who climbs Mt. Monadnock in Southern New Hampshire every day for years. I wonder how much he understands about the world because he understands that one place. How much he has seen the landscape change and remain the same. Here's an article from Yankee Magazine about him.

Much of the angst in my life has been leaving places I've come to know well and some of my greatest joys have been finding new ones.

On the Road Again

Alaska Highway - scale of the immensity & extremes the builders of this road had to face

Recently the newspaper the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner did a story on the celebration of the 70th birthday of the Alaska Highway. Our last post was about road tripping and had my gears greased about how many direction you could go with a road theme. Here's a few more to add to the list...

How was the road system started where you live? 

Did it follow old dog mushing trails, old native hunting trails? 

How was it built? 

Who built it? 

Was there controversy over putting some roads in your community in?  

Comparing road systems is also interesting - do the roads follow the contour of the land or are they in a rigid grid formation? 

The history of trails and roads is actually quite fascinating and will prove to teach a lot of concepts from history, physics to economics, and in an integrated way!

In preparation for our next trip I came across this great little find. We'll be exploring the art of navigation further with our 3 year old as we make our way around Florida doing the great-grandparent tour with the new baby. He's already has a great functioning knowledge... it helps that his dad has a degree in geography and cartography!

Road Trips & Summer's End

As summer dwindles down and you're trying to squeeze in that last road trip before the buses start rolling, there are some great lessons to learn that only being in the backseat of the family's vehicle can provide.

Content Areas:

• Geography - employ your child as the navigator... or at least the assistant navigator, involve and engage them with the map
• Science - meteorology - notice the weather in your different locations. Is that weather typical for that region? Why?
• Economy - stop by the local Chamber of Commerce in each town you visit. Discus what drives the economy in each area - coal? fishing? corn? car manufacturing?
• Writing - have your child keep a journal during the travel. If you have small children model the journal process for them - or let them dictate what they want to record and remember from the adventure.
• Literacy - collect books based or written by authors from the area you are visiting. Complement your Local Library with a Travel Library. This is a great way to connect learners with books and deepen their comprehension. These books are favorite bed time stories and are a great way to spark fond memories and conversations.
• Math - figure out your average travel stats... how many miles are you driving or hiking or biking a day? What's your average speed.
• Astronomy - one of my favorite games as a child was to pick a celestial landmark on our car rides at night and try to follow it with my eyes for as long as I could. Have a discussion about why the stars move.
• Art - have your child document the trip with drawings or photography

Centers at the Beach

Whether you are a homeschooling parent or a classroom teacher, centers are something you are probably familiar with. At home or in the classroom you might already set up stations for your children to rotate through. Typically stations are hands on activities that are short and sweet ways to allow your learners to experience a concept in a tactile way. Centers or stations also typically follow a theme. Today at the beach I noticed a whole gamut of mini lessons and examples of fundamental earth science principals. Our motto "Teach Locally, Learn Globally" exemplifies the broader microcosm, macrocosm relationship. The beach at low tide provides a mecca of microcosms to study to gain knowledge of bigger happenings in the world.

Tide Pools: 

Let's start with tide pools, they are a very simple contained ecosystem at low tide, that at high tide become part of the larger ecosystem - the cove, or even broader, the ocean. Studying a tide pool is like putting a microscope on the bigger happenings of the ocean. Focusing on how each of the organisms interact with one another illustrates how concepts such as food chains, symbiotic and parasitic relationships work.

River Formation:

Looking to runoff on beaches or even after a storm on the side of the road one can see the life story of a river. What takes thousands of years can happen in hours, even minutes. Learners can watch streams of rainwater begin to meander and braid themselves. Watching what glacier melt has taken so long to do and which can only be seen from an airplane on the larger scale. Simply taking bucket of water and releasing at the top of the beach allowing the water to head downhill toward the ocean can usually reenact the phenomena. Taking a video camera and creating a movie back at home or school would be a great way to integrate media into the lesson, by creating a documentary about the life cycle of a river.

A braided river from the air.

Rain run off on the beach

Tide:

While at the beach for the day take measurements of the waterline to determine how much the tide changes. This is easier to mention when the tide is receding than when it is coming in because you can make lines in the sand that don't get washed away. Have the students use a tide chart before hand to figure out when the best day for the field trip should be.
 

Materials: 

Some of the materials you may need for a day of centers at the beach are:

• tide chart
• field journals to record data/observations, draw diagrams and take notes etc...
• color pencils to sketch observations 
• measuring tape for measuring tide change
• buckets & scoops to collect specimens and samples
• magnifying glasses
• portable microscopes if available or you can take samples back home or to school
• marine life field guides for identifying species 
• camera with video
• clip boards 
• towels
  

What other activities or centers could you do during a field trip to the beach?

Salmonberries - Field Notes from Kodiak

My family and I have been thoroughly enjoying our extended stay in Kodiak this summer! We've explored mountains, beaches, rivers and the ocean. I was worried about not being able to go berry picking this year in my favorite spot back home outside of Anchorage. Kodiak has proved to be even better! I may not be able to move back!

My favorite part of the year is always berry picking season! It's in my blood, literally. My father is half Finnish, making me a quarter and the Finns are avid berry pickers as their climate is very similar to Alaska. Even those who immigrated to the US, kept up this tradition. My great grandmother owned a blueberry farm in southern New Hampshire. My grandfather made sure to have a bounty of blueberry bushes on his own property. My dad grew up picking berries at my Great Grandma Liimatainen's farm.

Alaska is a land where people take the utmost pride in their ability to subsist of the land. So be careful when you ask someone where their favorite blueberry spot is... they may lead you astray. Like favorite hunting grounds and fishing holes, we guard our berry picking spots with great secrecy, only to be shared with family or close friends.

My little forager.

This year was a new first for me in my long line of years picking the wild fruit... Salmonberries! What is a salmonberry you might ask. Well it is a beefed up close relative to the raspberry. The leaves and stems are very reminiscent of the raspberry, but the flower is big and bright pink. You can take the flower off the stem and suck the sweet fragrant nectar from it, much like you would with honeysuckle. The berries themselves are again much like the raspberry, with the same fruit structure, but much larger. They change in color from green, to orange to a deep blood red when ripe and are called salmonberries because they look strikingly like salmon roe (eggs). Not quite as sweet as their cousins, they make for the best pie I've ever had! They are great for making jam, sauces, wine and ice cream too.

Due to the cold, very snowy winter, they were a little later in their ripening this year. While my family was on one of our almost nightly walks on the docks, checking out the fishing boats and more importantly the new sailboats in from all over the world, I overheard a funny conversation between two burly fishermen getting their nets ready for their next run. They were cursing up a storm, when one stops and says "Hey what's up with the salmonberries this year? But this f*&%$ing time last year I was f#%^@ing making jam!" It seemed so comical to me that such a rough and tumble guy would be swearing and talking about one of the most historically domestic tasks. Even cussing, giant, weathered men have a soft side.


While the fisherman like salmonberries, so too do many of the birds. It is amusing to watch them after they've gorged themselves on the fruit, then try to take off and fly, markedly larger than when they had first landed. Flying much lower to the ground they take a while to gain altitude.

While at storytime at the local library, the children's librarian read a great story about berries, harnessing the many connections and experiences the children have with them this time of year. The craft to go along with the story was to make a berry bucket, complete with bells, so you can easily locate your child and in Kodiak hopefully warn the bears of your presence, as they love berries too. If only Sal in Blueberries for Sal had a berry bucket with bells... ah but then there wouldn't have been a good story to tell.

Here are the materials needed for the bucket:

• a yogurt container with lid
• hole puncher
• yarn
• pipecleaners
• bells
• stickers to decorate

Here's a link to my berry season post last year with a variety of lesson ideas, activities and books that focus on berry picking: Blueberry Buddies and Lessons from the Land.

Lessons from Professor Snowman

Inquiry learning focuses on the idea that the learner generates their own questions about the world and the teacher guides them in the search to find the answers. Being keen to listening for these questions (a.k.a. learning opportunities) is part of a teacher, mentor or parents' job.

My son has really wanted to build a snowman ever since the first snowfall in early November. The problem was it was too cold. Not too cold for us to be outside, but too cold for the snow to stick together. He wanted to know why.

Now my son is just shy of 3 years old. We aren't going to go really deep with this, but there are some ways we can work to develop an understanding of the concepts which answer this question. Inquiry is about the learner discovering, not about the teacher telling. The solution to this problem won't be found in a day, in fact, for this particular inquiry he won't know the real root of the answer for years. Knowledge builds and spirals on itself.

We start off by simply applying a very basic scientific method approach. Each day we look at the thermometer and I read the temperature to him. I ask him how cold it feels outside. Warm, chilly, cold, really cold or freezing? Then we try to make a snowball and discuss the texture and weight of the snow. Is it light and fluffy or heavy and clumpy. Does it stick together or fall apart? I wait to see if he draws any conclusions... it is a pretty sophisticated concept for a toddler to correlate temperature with snow conditions, but we're building the blocks for better understanding later.

With my 6th grade students we would start at a very different place. They will be able to read the thermometer themselves, for starters, but they quickly, if they haven't already in their lives, correlated temperature with snow conditions, especially if they are into skiing which many kids in this region are. Though with my particular group skiing is a luxury their families can't afford. They do however have prior knowledge to draw from, having years of snowball fighting and snowman building experience. They should also have some understanding of states of matter. Now we can start to deepen their comprehension of the concepts at play here. Having really worked with my students on how to use references they can start research in the library and the internet. They can also start to conduct experiments: recording data and observations. Date, time, temperature, snow quality. Eventually between research, experimentation, and a little guidance they are able to conclude that there exist subtleties between states of matter. You don't just go directly from ice to water. There are shades of grey in between. Some of the kids have discovered through their research how the molecular structure of water changes. This is when I see if I could get a local expert in. The University of Alaska, Anchorage and Alaska Pacific University are right here - a wealth of resources for any educator. I seek out a glaciologist and bring her in to help us put all the pieces together.

There are many extensions and culminating ways you can use to put this new found understanding to use and allow the students to apply their knowledge and for teachers and parents to assess the accuracy of the information gained:

• Have students keep a journal recording their daily investigations, research or experiments. Journals are a great way to tap into many different intelligences, as Howard Gardner would say. Students who are visual can draw and map out their findings while students who are very literal can do more writing. 
• A great cumulative way to prove their understanding of their path to discovery is to create a flow chart, mapping their way from their starting point - the question to their conclusion.
• The best test of what a student has learned is if they are able to explain the concept acquired in their own words - a wonderful way to do this is to explain the process to a younger audience. I often have my 6th grade students write stories or lead experiments for their 2nd grade reading buddies.

As we all know everyone learns differently, not everyone of my students is going to understand the true molecular differnces between snow at -20 degrees and snow at 31 degrees, but their understanding will be deeper and broader than it was before. Their understanding will stick with them and translate into many other realms because they led the inquiry and were not told the answer. They will have the tools to seek answers and solutions when teachers or parents are no longer in constant eye sight.

Reading about Place

I've always been drawn to reading books set in or about places I've been or lived. I like being able to imagine the landscape, buildings or people. I suppose they also helped me develop from being a struggling reader to a prolific one. I was able to tackle harder to read words by having a context in which to put them.

Here are some of my favorite books about Alaska, my home for the last decade. Some are children's books and some are novels meant for a more mature audience (though they are not graphic or lude in anyway).

• Arctic Lights, Arctic Nights by Debbie Miller, and illustrated by Jon Van Zyle
• My Lead Dog Was A Lesbian: Mushing Across Alaska in the Iditarod--the World's Most Grueling Race by Brian Patrick O'Donoghue
• Recess at 20 Below by Cindy Aillaud
• The Accidental Adventurer by Barbara Washburn, the first woman to Climb Denali
• Tisha: The Story of a Young Teacher in the Alaska Wilderness by Anne Purdy & Robert Specht
• Two in the Far North by Margaret E. Murie
• Up on Denali by Shelly Gill, illustrated by Shannon Cartwright
• Winterdance by Gary Paulsen
• All books written by Debbie Miller
• All books illustrated by Shannon Cartwright

Solstice Lesson Planning

In a little over a month we will officially begin Winter, though it feels like we've been fully engulfed in it already here in Anchorage, Alaska. Solstices and Equinoxes are important markers this far north, where we notice the drastic differences from the midnight sun of June to the long dark & cold days in December. The winter solstice is our hub of reference and the peak at which we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. You don't have to be at an extreme latitude to notice the differences and compare them to other parts of the world.

A local author, Debbie Miller and illustrator, Jon Van Zyle teamed up to create the fantastic book Arctic Nights, Arctic Lights. Each page illustrates the average day for each month, a short description about what a typical day in interior Alaska looks like, the average temp and the sunrise and sunset times. The border on each page is cleaverly a chart of the amount of daylight and darkness for each day. There is also a brief informational introduction about Alaska and the characteristics of life at this latitude and a great glossary of terms specific to this locale.

This book & topic provide so much fodder for all kinds of learning opportunities and integrated cross-curricular lessons. Math, science and social studies completely intertwined! No matter what level you teach there exist so many ways to extend from this simple & beautiful picture book.

Math -

• Figure out the length of the day using the sunrise and sunset times from the book. 
• Chart the daylight and darkness. You can do this together as a class, in groups or as individuals depending on your child, or classes developmental stage. I found my 6th grade students had some rather ingenious algorithms for correctly calculating the daylight and darkness. 
• Compare the daylight & darkness charts or overlapping them is a power visual.
• Then choose your locale (if you are in interior Alaska find the information for somewhere else in the world, perhaps closer to the Equator) and get your local sunrise/sunset info using the weather section of your local newspaper or the internet. Create the same kind of graph of the daylight and darkness in your neck of the woods.
• Compare graphs.
• Another extension for this lesson is to do this as an ongoing project - once a week get the local sunrise/sunset times for your local paper. Add a new bar or plot to your graph every week over the course of the school year

Writing:

• Have the students/class create a book using Arctic Nights, Arctic Lights as a template and tailoring it to your place.
• I loved doing projects like this with older kids and then having them share/apply their knowledge by reading their books to a younger audience, for instance reading buddies.

Science:

• Through comparison look at interior Alaska as an ecosystem and analyze how the drastic changes in daylight and darkness effect the biology of the organisms that live there. Compare that to a different latitude and how more balanced daylight might affect the ecology there.

Social Studies:

• Again through comparison look at how the daylight & darkness effect the traditions, daily rituals & life patterns of people at northern latitudes vs your own latitude or one completely different.

My All Time, Hands Down, Favorite Read Aloud

From Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to the Fantastic Mr. Fox, all of Roald Dahl's books make for fantastic read alouds! His playful use of language does such a wonderful job illustrating for the imagination his other worlds and alternate realities. The broken, uneven, yet profound, poetic and silly bumblings of the BFG are so much fun to read aloud, it is a shame to read them only in your head. They literally seem to tickle the tongue.

“A whizzpopper!" cried the BFG, beaming at her. "Us giants is making whizzpoppers all the time! Whizzpopping is a sign of happiness. It is music in our ears! You surely is not telling me that a little whizzpopping if forbidden among human beans?”  from the BFG.

The Witches, however, is by far, hands down, my favorite read aloud book of all time! The way Dahl captures  the Grand High Witch's Bavarian accent through spelling phonetically & tweaking the words make for the ultimate story telling experience. Even for me a rather conservative, self conscious reader I am easily able to loose myself in the characters. It is clear this author intended it to be shared this way. His clever description of how to detect a witch has the students on the edges of their seat and you can feel them start to closely observe you, the reader, for signs that you may be one. A master at bringing the reader and audience into the fold, Dahl makes the two dimensional text pop out at you.

What is your favorite read aloud?

Project Wild & Project Learning Tree

These are two of the finest environmental education programs around. Trainers are located all over the country that can help you tailor the lessons to your neck of the woods. I had the pleasure of participating in the training for both Project Wild and Project Learning Tree (PLT) 10 years ago when I was completing my internship and the program has only gotten better since then. One of the things I love about this programs is the user friendly materials they provide educators and the activities they have designed full engage all of the multiple intelligences. These aren't just lessons, they are games and hands on experiments to fully engage students from kindergarten through high school. Here in Alaska the program is sponsored by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the http://www.dnr.state.ak.us/ .

PLT even offers trained teachers grant opportunities for up to $1000 to plan service projects!

Blueberry Buddies and Lessons from the Land

Lia (from Skedaddle) and I packed up our boys this morning and made a trip to a favorite top secret blueberry location. Like hunting grounds, fishing holes and gold claims, favorite berry crops are kept between close friends in Alaska. The boys did all the hiking on their own. After the adventure, in both houses, pie became the fate of the wild grown alpine fruit. Out of ALL the blueberry recipes in my cookbook, The Joy of Blueberries: Natures Little Blue Powerhouse, pie always seems to win... well it ties with the blueberry coffee cake.

Some concepts that can be taught through berry picking and the requisite baking after:

• Estimating - estimate how many berrys are in your container then count them.
• Volume - pour berries from a smaller container into a larger one
• Ecology - food chain, paying attention to where the berries are found on the mountain side - are they near streams? high in the rocky areas? low in the boggy areas? Is this habitat to other creatures?
• Topography & Geography  - bring a compass or a gps device to record your coordinates, pay attention to the terrain and elevation gain as you hike.
• Measurement & Fractions- baking
• Democracy - let the students or members of your family vote on the fate of the berries... pies, smoothies, muffins etc...
• History - in my family's case blueberries are an important part of our history, my great-grandmother owned a blueberry farm in New Hampshire, as did many other 1st generation Finnish Americans. Berry's are also a part of the subsistence culture of Alaska from it's Native peoples to the gold miners fighting off scurvy in the long winter months.
• Literary connections - as I mention in an earlier post Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McCloskey is a favorite in our house. Blueberry Shoe, by Ann Dixon, a local author is another.
• Nutrition - There are many benefits to eating berries - antioxidants and fiber are just the beginning.

 

    

Nature Walks and Journaling with Toddlers - Start Young

While I am a strong believer of free play, both my son and I are needing some structured activities during the day. I have this fabulous book I just found in all my teaching materials collecting dust in the garage: 365 Days of Creative Play: for children 2 yrs. and up. It is full of simple things to do each day. Most are pretty straight forward and some are easily modified for your own family's needs or the materials you happen to have on hand.

 

While I've always planned on creating a nature journal with my little guy it was the extra boost I needed to get going. The prompt was simple - collect things outside and glue them to a piece of cardboard. The teacher in me took it a little further. Journaling and scientific observation require a few mandatory steps:

1. Date, time, location
2. Drawings, glued in specimens, photos or written observations
3. Labels

We collected our specimens on our 10 am amble down the Chester Creek Trail near our home. I initiated collecting the first few items and modeled putting them in our collection container (aka bucket). Soon the bucket was full. We stopped to watch a Stellar Blue Jay swoop through the under brush of the forest. A squirrel chattering high in a tree had us scanning the canopy until we spotted it. Many stops along the creek were made, but no fish were spotted. Some trees were rushing ahead of the rest to change color.

When arriving back home we took a break for a well earned snack and then went to work making our first entry into our ecology journal. We looked at the calendar to find the date and the clock for the time. I wrote that in. The little bear glued in his specimens and we labeled them. I wrote down a bunch of labels and he got the hang of it and started scribbling his labels next to his specimens. While labeling things we took a closer look at many of the leaves, the patterns of the veins and the holes where some sort of creature must have had a good lunch. We hypothesized about what type of animal might make such wholes and concluded it must have been a caterpillar like in Eric Carl's The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

I think we may begin trying to collect a few specimens from each Taiga Trek. It would be interesting to see the variety that comes from different locations and various seasons.

Materials:

1. We used thick pieces of water color paper. Card stock would work to. I chose a more rigid paper so it doesn't bend and bow when holding it up under the weight of the specimens.
2. Elmer's Glue
3. Nature specimens collected from our walk
4. Pencil to label the specimens and record other pertinent info.
5. Since each page is rather bulky with many 3-d objects glue to them we are using a box or an old rubbermaid tote to chronologically organize our entries. This way we aren't squishing everything every time the book is closed.