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....

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

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.

Green Kid Crafts Parent Advisory Committee

This craft made a sick day a whole lot better!

Taiga Teacher (aka Harmony) is proud to have been asked to serve on the Parent Advisory Committee for Green Kid Crafts. This is an amazing company led by two mamas dedicated to environmental efficacy, while at the same time providing a product that is educational and just down right fun for children. Their business issues subscriptions of 3 developmentally appropriate green craft kits a month.

We absolutely love receiving ours in the mail every month. My Little Bear (age 3) recognizes the package when we go out to the mailbox and is excited to immediately get to work on a craft. We've found we always keep one of the kits on hand as an activity for the babysitter to do with him. They both love presenting the finished product to us when we arrive home! The end result is always thrilling for my son to share with others and they often turn into wonderful presents for the grandparents. The windchimes he made last fall were a perfect housewarming present for Pepe's new abode. They are also great diversions on rainy and sick days.

This creation proudly sits in Bop's office.

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.

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.

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

 

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

Start a Local Library

In the home or the classroom - start a Local Library. Collect books written by local authors, set in your region or illustrated by local artists. We have a bi-coastal library in our home. Books from New England and Alaska. It's a powerful thing to share your "place" with your children too. We love reading Good Night Rhode Island and talking about where Mima, Pepe, Auntie, Uncle and cousins live.