The Meandering Path

The journey continues.
The grade 3s were very busy planning their Indigenous communities. The excitement continued            
with students bringing in rope, wood, twigs, homemade games and more! It was amazing
momentum. Then it was March break. We couldn't build prior to the break so we decided to take one period to visit the space and determine which area of shared space would be ideal for creating the community. Students used our social studies resource to reflect and discuss which area is more like the studied communities. How will we build our homes? How will we demonstrate our understanding of how the land was used for food? How will we represent transportation?

"This is like the Anishinabek community because
they lived near the water to catch fish."

"This could be where we store our hunting tools" 

Although the dialogue was rich within the forest,  student behaviours to and from the forest were unsafe and silly. I returned feeling overwhelmed by firefighting (putting out student fires everywhere) and was frustrated.  It was great to have the week off so that I could reflect and rework this plan.

BACK AT IT...
I was so fortunate to attend a session at Brickworks the Friday before March break where I was able to experience multiple teaching strategies  (all in one day) to engage and motivate students. Guess what? They kinda work. LOL
Upon our return from March break, we had a class discussion of the importance of safety and each  community group committed to four goals of what they can do to promote a more safe experience.
We reviewed  expectations and went outside to work on our routines. Our goal was to improve our teamwork skills, attend to tasks and follow listening routines.  My fox feet, eagle eyes and deer ears were out and I integrated various activities:
Walking there- A line game of Hawk & Bunny (someone shared it with me-it worked)
A field game - Seeking shelter from predators in a Beaver Dam or Rabbit Den
Hawk & Mouse game
Nature Hunt
Hawk & Bunny on return back

                      

               We found this. Can we use it for our longhouse?  

What kind of animal poo is this? I think it is a dog.
No it isn't a dog's poo. 

             

                                  Mrs. Mott, this is scat paradise right here! 

Are these seeds? Can we take it inside? 

We came back, had a meditation and then reviewed how it went. How did it feel? It. Felt. Great.

I am struggling with a few things.
I can see the excitement and engagement of our learning outside. They cannot wait to jump in and keep building, collaborating and creating. At the same time I  am thinking of the idea 'never work harder than your students'. I feel I am working tirelessly at trying to keep them focused on the way to and from and throughout group or whole class discussions. It appears that they are so stimulated outside that they just don't want to stop, wait or engage if it means stopping their body. Unfortunately, it is not a free for all.
Did I jump in too fast? Do I continue to revamp lessons and stop and work on specific and necessary skills? At the same time, I realized that I need to acquire more skills to help support our learners for outdoor learning. The workshop at Brickworks came at a perfect time.

I am so happy that we have this knowledge in our building and I enthusiasticly look forward to continuing our learning with only slight trepidation. :)

First of many Nature Walks!

Our very first "Nurture Walk" was exhausting, in a good way!  We had sent out notification to our families that we would be going on Friday mornings for our Nature Walks, only to be cancelled in the event of thunder and lightening.  The children generally came dressed well for the weather with the exception of one student but boots were borrowed from another class.  Both Jeremy and I felt that we really wanted to lay a strong groundwork for our Nature Walks to be successful.  Whole group discussions with regards to what our Nature Walks would look like and sound like.  We went out in pairs on the cold damp Friday morning.  For an hour we walked the forest, for some of the time walking like a fox, seeing like an eagle and listening with deer ears!  Upon our return it was our hope to have introduce the knowledge building circle and to actually have one.  Time only allowed for a brief introduction of Jeremy's special hawk talking feather and a few children had the chance to share.  This week we will revisit our ideas of what our Nature Walks will look and sound like to make changes, adjustments to our original ideas.  We didn't stay in pairs and that was fine, we weren't always quiet like a fox, was that a problem?  We did collect lots of things, what are we going to do with the stuff?  When will we do stuff with our stuff?    So our goal this week, revisit last weeks ideas, have a kbc, teach children in small groups about sit spots and what we think their use will look like.
Learning is what happens when you are busy making other plans!

Team 114
Jeremy and Brenda

I made it online!

Hello Everyone,

Sorry for my late post.... I had thought that I was able to post and then had some troubles so a big thank you to Stan for helping me out with my tech issues!

It has been a little while since we spent the day learning together and  I feel as though I am still working through all of the great dialogue and topics raised throughout the day. I feel very lucky to be a part of this group and to have had the day to meet, discuss and learn with all of you!

So far, Jen and I have made plans to take part in "Walking Wednesdays" with our classes. Our classes have met together and discussed safety and how we can prepare for our adventures outside of the school. Huge thank you to Tanya for coming in and helping us learn how to be safe and what we can expect outside! Needless to say my class is VERY excited to go out and I am as well.... I've been meaning to get outside more all year and this was the perfect catalyst to take a leap and try something new with my learners. Stay tuned for pictures on my class twitter site (which is also a new endeavor that my class is taking part in!)

I've also been incorporating the idea that we should "never work harder than our learners".... and upon reflection I was definitely doing things that my class could easily do on their own. We've been trying our Knowledge Building Circles in class and it has gone fairly smoothly. Most learners have jumped at the chance to have their voice heard and they enjoy choosing who speaks next. As we are in Grade 1 we still sometimes struggle to stay on task and to listen respectfully to our peers. I'm hopeful that the more we use the KBC, the better we will get at it!

I'm always open to new ideas to help keep the attention of my sometimes "restless" learners who struggle to stay on task during group time on the carpet. Does anyone have any ideas? :)

I'm ON!

Hi Everyone, 

Took me a few tries to get on BUT I'm here and I've got it! Just spend the last little while looking through all the posts and before I say anything can I just say WE ROCK! I'm so excited to be apart of this team learning journey. After reading the posts I've become inspired with so many ideas. Jen - I love how you've labeled Wednesday as 'Walk Wednesday'. What a great way to have structure and routine mixed with flexible learning (learning that happens organically during 'Walk Wednesday'). I welcome the idea to have some of your students share their journals entries with my SK S. 

Since our large meeting my teaching partner and I have added different strategies into our program. One of the things we are working hard on is "not working harder than our students" After listening to Stan talk about this I stepped back and realized how capable young minds are. We have done this in simple ways - i.e. when there is a problem we simple support by saying, "I notice _ looks sad how are we going to problem solve this." I catch myself posing more questions and giving less information at the start. 

We continue with our Forest Friday adventures - although the last two Friday have been cold we have still gone out. We have changed our loose parts station to objects collected in the forest by our students. This makes it personal and gives a sense of empowerment because they have chosen it. 

Next, I'd like to focus on finding something that is a "problem" (real life problem within our community - learning locally) and determine as a whole how we can solve it.

We are continuing with our amaryllis investigation which will come to an end after March Break because its life cycle is over.. We've noticed a sense of "providing" with our student when they took care of, observed and researched our amaryllis. We've got some seeds from TomatoSphere (controlled seeds - from earth, and seeds that harvested on the international space station in July and August 2016). We plan to grow these inside and place them (the ones that survive) into the outside school garden. We also plan to place a birds nest (that I found) in the forest and have our students find it - our hope is that our students notice the garbage in the nest - the rest is up to our students. 

Caitlyn 

Planning Time

Brenda I are really thankful for the support of our Administration yesterday for providing us with some release time so that we could begin to plan to integration some nature play/inquiry into our program.  Looking forward to the time we have blocked out on Friday mornings to begin some nature exploration!

Walking Wednesday

Took the class out into the forest today for Walking Wednesday, after a great introductory lesson last week from a fellow Outdoor Education Specialist! She was amazing! It really set the tone and the kids really enjoyed looking forward to and planning our excursion! They had an amazing time in the forest today! It was super windy and the trees were alive with movement! There were many wonderings and wishes! We came back using our "fox feet" and we did a class Journal about the experience. Now, for more writing tomorrow along with an illustration...and a plan for another visit soon! Please stay tuned...

Making our thinking visible

Dear team,
After a few technical glitches, I have arrived. Thanks for everyone's patience.
Appreciation too to our wonderful team - how awesome to see, hear and even feel the learning that has occurred and is now happening in our classrooms, learning spaces and outdoors. My reflections have been around making thinking visible. This notion is one we have explored with students. We often ask them to make their thinking visible, as it is happening or afterwards in reflective opportunities. My wondering have been around us as professionals. How often do we make our thinking visible to our students and to each other? In a more formal leadership role, a further question is how to help create the conditions for staff to be able to make their thinking visible safely and feel inspired to do so.

I really appreciate how you are making your thinking visible here. In time, we may also feel confident to broaden our audience to include more than our working group. Hats off to Tanya who helped make her thinking visible in our hallway of late:

This is located in our east hallway and helps outline thinking, student learning, our learning and more within the four frames of the FDK program. Never underestimate the power of this type of work to achieve many things, including

- celebrating student and staff work

- documenting learning over time

- connecting the dots for students and staff

- making thinking visible for ourselves and others

Another group impacted is our community. As parents and families walk our hallways they too will see our thinking on our walls which is incredible.

Does such actions pose risk?

Yes.

 I think many of us may have hesitations when we "put ourselves out there". We may wonder "what will people think?", "what if someone disagrees with my thinking?" "will I be judged on my thinking", "what if I have to rethink my thinking"? and in the age of the internet "wow, my thinking is out there for all time to be picked up, examined and recycled".....

I see our group has cast off all those doubts which is inspiring and thank you for taking this risk.

 The reality is all those things may happen, but the risk we are taking is well worth the reward of the rich learning now underway. By making our thinking visible, we impact our learning and the learning of others, So thank you for taking this risk and for teaching me so much.

Greg 

Alignment

NOTE: In case others are having a tricky time, I had trouble posting at first and needed to request a second 'invite' from Stan.   

There is a lot to unpack from last week!  Not only did we have our amazing LSF session but I was out for 2 other PD sessions that left my head spinning.  The lovely part was that through the week, I was slowly 'Connecting The Dots' with each of them and felt privileged to be doing PD that was truly aligned with my passions.  Hmmmm, that's a different thought.  PD for passion.  I like the sounds of it...

Here are my recent take-aways from all this PD and some of my questions moving forward...

Monday (Outdoor Council of Canada Course) - co-facilitating and turning the ownership of the PD over to the group has been a breath of fresh air for the both this course and the previous course we ran.  It is in this 'place' where I actually find my strongest and most confident voice.  By recognizing and honouring the 'knowledge in the room' (even in a certification course) I find it sets a tone for richer learning.  It brings a safety to the group where we can step outside our comfort zones and take risks while supporting one another.  This led beautifully into...

Tuesday (LSF) - thanks to all the support/coordination (we did it!) most of us were able to really slow things down and look deeply at how this related to us personally as educators, our school, our kids. Amazing.  It brought professional collaborative work to the next level AND included a variety of voices which I loved.  I walked away feeling like we had each others backs...that we now had a network that allowed us to say "Help!" or "Can You Celebrate This With Me!" Both equally important.  One of my take aways on Tuesday was similar to Kim's comment about revisiting the document Natural Curiosity.  I learned that things I have been digesting, experimenting with, reflecting on for the last 5 years STILL FEEL SO NEW!  Each time I look at those 2 resources, I get something completely different.  This year, more than any other time working with this 'inquiry stance', I am more emotionally invested than ever.  Perhaps it is because things got personal this year. Our little guy is struggling in our system and it both heartbreaking and a catalyst for learning all that I can to support him.

Thursday (Evergreen Brickworks) - a day dedicated to developing nature connections with our early learners in a fun, engaging and accessible way.  Phenomenal facilitation, idea generation and visioning left us walking away ready to make some small (and BIG) changes around our school yard. This has inspired moving forward with a school-wide visioning assembly which will serve to collect student voice (and parents who attend!) around further development of our school yard space with an emphasis on student engagement through loose parts play.  After capturing student and staff voice and combining it with data we already have from parents, we hope to move forward with a 3-phase plan

'Connecting the Dots' through these experiences, it looks like my own personal focus will be:

1. Making the Learning More Visible - to students, staff, community (including the Knowledge Building when we bring the curiosity inside...) and;

2. Capturing Student Voice 

Our Looking Inside The 4-Frames with an invitation for
Grade 1, 2, 3 to see their own learning reflected in the 4 areas.
TO DO: shift INQUIRY section and move it to the left of the board.
It is too cluttered and it needs its own 'spotlight'! Any other suggestions?

To the right: With Brenda's artistic skills supporting the vision, we have started using the bulletin board outside my  office to capture the learning inside the 4-Frames of the new FDK program.   I also want to use social media (Twitter/Remind), add to our RMPS Outdoor Learning folder, and share more bits and pieces in staff meetings when possible.

Second goal, CAPTURING STUDENT VOICE, has always been so important to me.   Happy to report we have an assembly in the works for after March Break.  Inspired by the folks at Evergreen Brickworks, we would like to create an opportunity for students to dream both small and big about their ideal outdoor space.  We think the Dot-Mocracy activity we did together at Evergreen would be a great tool once we collect student voice (and parents if they attend!).  Once our school comes up with 20 or so big ideas that are manageable and set us up for success, each student/staff will have 3 'votes' similar to below.  We shared this vision at the Staff Meeting last night.   Any thoughts or feedback around this process are welcome!  I want to be mindful that it isn't just 'token' student voice...and that we truly will be able to honour their ideas.  Do you think this will work? How can we set it up so that we don't have waterslides on everyone's ideal greenspace?! Any advice around next steps?

Student Voice and Making Our Learning Visible - Mapping Our Community:

In Outdoor Learning News, two of our FDK classes went outside for a mapping walk last week around our community.  My hope is that this may be a spark into a potential mapping inquiry which could lead to an action project that would help the community but who knows. It can at the very least help inform and set the stage for our planning/visioning assembly for our dream school outdoor space.

You can see the collaborative group maps we started when we came back inside.  Hmmmm, tricky part about prep/planning coverage is that some of these sparks are lost with lack of time and inability to follow-through...I encouraged the class to post it somewhere where they could continue adding their ideas until the next time we met.  Any other suggestions on how to weave these experiences more seamlessly into the FDK program outside of my own time with the class?

Next Steps:

I plan to invite kids to bring in a map from home and I will bring my wilderness tripping maps, local township maps as well as our school map below to spark more discussion about symbols, pictures, scale, directions, etc.  We had the National Geographic giant map 'Canada From Space' earlier in the year that we can now reference back to as that was a really fun, experiential intro to maps.  Any thoughts?

My commitment which was added to our collaborative sculpture at Evergreen last Thursday was to take these tools/ideas and continue to share and build capacity in our school. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed being at the school on a part-time basis and keep reminding myself  'slow and steady' and 'big changes start with small steps'.  One of my flaws is saying YES to everything which gets me into trouble so I might need reminders from this group to take it one step at a time.

So inspired to be learning with all of you,

- Tanya

Getting Started

After our session last week, I left like I do most times after a professional development session - Inspired and excited! Although something was different this time. I started to feel ans "see" the connections between many of my current passions in my professional practice. I have been on a journey in understanding the importance of creating a safe environment for all students, a focus on the mental health of myself and my students, Self-Regulation through Shanker's work, Carol Dweck's Growth Mindset, and I was beginning to understand of the importance that Outdoor Education and Inquiry base learning has in supporting these other concepts, but something was missing. Something was preventing me from jumping off the ledge fully. 
Once I was introduced to Natural Curiosity for the 'third' time...I was finally ready to hear and see what it was offering, that I wasn't able to before.  

Here are some quotes that made me pause and reflect;

1) "For students to understand their fundamental connections with all living things, they need opportunities to connect directly with the environment, and to reflect on that experience.  As teachers, we cannot expect students to connect with the environment if we confine them, and our teaching approaches, to the prescribed boundaries of classroom walls, worksheets, and textbooks." (Pg. 37) 
  As I     have been trying to focus on how to support the Learning of my very active and disengaged students, I have seemed to get away from going outside. Don't ask me why? Maybe because my comfort is the routine of the day and going outside with one adult and    
21 students was not apart of my regular routine. But again, after many different   conversations with colleagues, I was ready to hear the message and it has clicked.  I am planning on taking the student outdoors each day this week to attempt to spark an inquiry that most can get excited about. ☺️ We will see what this does for the active and disengaged students in our class. 👍🏽

2) " All education is environmental education.  By what is included or excluded, students are taught that what they are apart of or apart from the natural world. We must be wary not to imprint a disciplinary template onto impressionable minds and with the belief that the world really is as disconnected as the divisions, disciplines, and sub-disciplines of the typical curriculum.  Students come to believe that there is such a things as politics separate from ecology or that economics has nothing to do with physics.  It just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout the curriculum." (Pg. 43)

This statement was very evident last week when I posed a question for our students during the "literacy block" that said " How many tennis balls will we need so every chair in our classroom can be nice and quiet so we can focus on our learning? 

As the students went to work using various strategies to try and come up with an answer to our 'real life' problem, a student came up to me and said, " why are we doing math now and not after recess?" I was blown away. I knew I was a teacher who valued the interconnectedness of the subject and curriculum, but it was clear in that moment, that in creating a highly predictable learning spaces for all, I had unintentionally taught them that math was something that happened after recess. This has now become one of my focus areas. I want to look at my schedule and see how I can integrate the curriculum more  effectively while still giving a sense of predictability. 😊
Like 
3) " Stewardship is a form of civic responsibility and of comparable value to other primary  learning expectations such as the acquisition of content knowledge." (Pg. 57) 

I am passionate in supporting opportunities for students to see how they can contribute and have a positive impact on the world around them. I believe this is necessary for the mental health and well-being of our students, however, I have fallen into the trap of trying to get through content on prescribed timelines  and I have missed many opportunities to encourage and foster our student to see themselves our world and be able to make a difference. I can see now how integrating the curriculum,  giving student voice, and fostering a connection with our community and world can offer many outstanding opportunities to inspire stewardship all our students. I think the real problem will be to select what we are going to work on. ☺️

Like Crystal, I gave the students the real life challenge of the balls for our chairs and as I watched the students interact, listened to their conversations and supported them only through prompting questions, I discovered many things about our students. 
1) Cooperation skills
2) Communication skills
3) Organizational skills
4) Problem-Solving skills
5) Perseverence
6) Self-Regulation
7) Math concepts they are familiar and comfortable with (ie. organizing data, comfort with seeing patterns in objects and  comfort with the  100's chart to count by 2's or 4's 

These are just a "few" examples of what was visible. ☺️ 

The real excitement was to see how the students worked together, shared their ideas and strategies with each other and they all grew in their learning to problem solve using math concepts, team work, collaboration, and perseverence! Some students were focussed on expanding their thinking and use of math concepts, while others were working on collaboration or perseverence. 

My question still remains, how do you capture the evidence of learning in all different areas that is effective, valuable to the students and manageable on me?