Just 2 More Days to Show Your Support!

If you feel strongly that outdoor education is important in our children's education please make your voice be heard! AKELP is looking for your feedback on the Alaska Environmental Literacy Plan! Please go to the link below to show your support and thoughts! Comments are due this week, by February 15th! Please show them some love for this amazing initiative! http://eed.alaska.gov/tls/akelp/

Alaska Environmental Literacy Plan

Yay! Taiga Teacher (Harmony) will be an adviser for the Alaska Environmental Literacy Plan! I am so very excited to be part of such an important step in the right direction for public schools in Alaska! I'll be posting information about its development and how you can help with input! It's just a volunteer role, helping where I can, but a foot in the door of the ed. policy world. It is also special to me because it is directly linked to the No Child Left Inside Act, initiated by Senator Jack Reed from my home state of Rhode Island. My brother actually worked for Reed in DC at the when the act was introduced and spent some time working on it.

An Old Tradition with a Local Twist

Instead of the traditional gingerbread house we create log cabins, complete with sod roofs (frosted mini wheats), and outhouses! I've been doing this for years in my classroom and with my family, thanks to the idea from a great teacher and mentor. It is a great way to celebrate community. In the classroom, right after Thanksgiving,  I would send out a letter asking for parents to donate the materials and to save the date. Parents were invited in to come in and build these with us. In the past we've invited our buddy class and their families or we've extended a welcome to one of the special education classes and their families. We'd always have Charlie Brown Christmas music playing softly in the background and cocoa. Now that my oldest is almost 4, we've begun the tradition at home. My mom and niece recently visited us, from Rhode Island, for the week of Turkey Day. This is what we created.


List of Materials:

• Rod Pretzels
• Frosting - we found an egg free royal icing recipe off the web - basically confectionery sugar, water & cream of tartar.
• Graham crackers
• Frosted Mini-wheats
• Writing Icing
• Cardboard wrapped w/ tin foil
• Assorted candies and cake decorations
• Small milk carton - used to provide interior structure for the cabin

Content Areas: Science - Structures, Social Studies - dwellings, Art - architecture, design, Literacy - so many great books to tie this in with at all reading levels from Call of the Wild to the Cabin that Moose Built.

Live outside of Alaska? How could you put a local twist on the gingerbread house tradition? We discussed what a Rhode Island version would look like with our guests. We thought the shape of the house would be the traditional Cape, with things like a lobster pot in the yard.

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