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?