The school that I am doing my internship at is located in the White Lake however is part of the Walled Lake School District. Around this area it is mostly lakes, land and neighborhoods. The other two members in my group have grown up in the Walled Lake/White Lake area, so exploring the community is not as exciting for them as it was for me. Just by driving to the school each day I pass by five different lakes, many small forest or open fields and neighbors hoods. Many of our students live on lakes and water sports are a big part of their lives.
One of the places that we have deiced to visit is the local Fair that is coming up. One needs to be able to read the different signs of where to line up or reading the directions to get there. Once there, the students would be able to use rich vocabulary to describe the different rides or activities that they have gone one. For instance, “my stomach dropped when we hit the first big hill on the ride”. One thing I expect to find are rides, different kinds of games and fun food.
The place that I am most excited to visit is the Outdoor Education Center located. Many students in my class have stated they attend the Outdoor Education Center on the weekend with their families. Also, I am in a fifth grade class and this is the location where we will be going to for fifth grade camp. I expect to see different variations of outdoor activities, including petting zoo, nature trails, horse back riding and different lakes/ponds. I think the biggest literacy piece the students are going to gain while at the center is learning to write about nature and describe things with great details.
Another activity that is very common among students in our class is recreational activities. Many of my students play football, hockey, dance, cheer, basketball, volleyball, softball or baseball. Visiting these sporting events we found that the students need to have almost a different sent of vocabulary to understand the game. From jump shots to first done to different jumps not everyone might know about these activities. So one writing assignment we might do is have the students write out the rules of the game and explain them in way that everyone will understand. Also, this is help picking out different books to catch their attention and have them read things they enjoy doing.
Megan,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading about your community experience. I got really excited when I read that you teach by an Outdoor Education Center. Having an Environmental Science background (minor), I am always pleased when these facilities are close to students to use. It is amazing what you can bring back into your classroom room from those experiences and relating them to not only outdoor education, but literacy as well. For one of my classes I had to plan an environmental science unit. I had students create a “Nature Notebook” at the beginning of the unit, where they carry and write down things they observe. This gives them an outlet to express what they are seeing, feeling, thinking while outdoors. I had a Nature Notebook myself and looking back it was such a positive experience. It allowed you to inquire about certain things you were wondering about, research it and write what you learned. I would suggest that if you do take advantage of this facility that you incorporate into your classroom. It was also fun for my students because they didn’t feel like they were doing work, it was almost like a diary they were keeping of the experience they were having. Very positive! It is great when students learn and practice skills when they don’t think they are! It is amazing how interconnected literacy and Language arts are to other subjects and things in the area. It is pretty awesome that you have such great outdoor resources that you can draw on and connect to within your classroom. Especially getting the students active and engaged could help make more meaningful connections in your lessons. You seem to have great resources in the city for the students to utilize and I look forward to hearing about how you utilized the Outdoor Center within your classroom or draw from experiences in the Outdoor Center within your classroom. Keep me updated! And let me know if you need help with any lesson plans involving Environmental Studies I did a couple of Professional Developments through the Detroit Zoo and have curriculum and lesson plans geared for outdoor education and connecting ourselves with our environment. So please let me know if I can help! I hope you are able to utilize the beautiful area as much as possible! They could even connect in artistic ways with drawing or other inquiry projects!
Thanks for a good read!
Shannon
Megan-
ReplyDeleteI hope your community exploration went well, from what you wrote in your blog, it seems like there were a lot of cool places for you to visit. My uncle lives out in that area, and it really is wild how many lakes and how into their water sports the people out there are. I really liked what you said about using the fair as a tool to elicit rich language from your students. From what I have been noticing in my writers workshops, the hardest things form my fifth graders to do is 1. come up with a meaningful/rich story or event to write about, and 2.injecting juicy details into their writing to liven it up. A lot of their stories turn into a simple recollection of events without any substantial and vivid details to make the story pop. I think it is a great idea to use a trip like that to kind of jog the kids memories, and especially if you explicitly told them before you went to really be tuned into how they feel, what they see, smell, hear.
Also, my class is going to 5th grade camp at the outdoor center in Walled Lake too! What dates are you going? We can talk more about this later, but I think it would be really cool if we could set up an interactive medium for the kids from our classes to communicate with each other before about what they are wondering and pondering, and after about what they learned and got out of the experience. Let me know what you think!