This morning our class met at Cottonwood Island Park to explore the principles from the book “A Walking Curriculum: Evoking Wonder And Developing Sense of Place (K-12)” and try out some of the walks ourselves. It was nice to be out on the land, interacting with it and the creatures that inhabit the area. Even though it was a cold, wintry morning our class had a lot of fun and were able to learn some skills and reflect along the way. In some ways, the pain of freezing in the snow together helped build the community within the group.
We worked through three different walks in groups of three (three really IS a good number!). The walks had us look deeper at the land around us, searching for shapes, movement and texture. I like that the intentionality helped us find connections between the things we learn at school and the land around us. I felt it helped build relevance. For example, Emily HM, Ethan and I were looking for shapes when we identified one that we could not remember the name of (pictured below).
I was running through every geometry term I could remember and Rhomboid popped into my head. This was a wild guess on my part but Emily HM remembered the rhomboid muscles (pictured below) that are named based on the shape. It was cool to have this cross-curricular moment.
This activity had connections to math (geometry, angles, engineering), social studies (developed in our lesson plan, and science (weather, ornithology, botany, environmental science, etc.), and more. It also beautifully demonstrates the FPPL:
Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness, on reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place).
We had a lot of fun developing a lesson plan afterwards and challenging ourselves to make multiple connections in different subjects.
Aside from learning and curricular connections. This was a really enjoyable field trip. Some of my favourite moments included watching the ducks charge over, seeing classmates try to get chickadees to land on their hands, and simply walking and chatting. Afterwards, when photos were being shared, a photo of Rob offering his hand for a chickadee came up and Quinn kindly photoshopped a bird into the photo.
