Take Me Outside Day/ Week

Hi blog!

Welcome back to this weeks EDCI 336 AND EDCI 250 weekly reflection!

This week was Take Me Outside Week, rather than Take Me Outside Day, how exciting! We got to work with 2 different schools, the G school and the K school. I chose not to include any of the school names but rather assigned them letters. Here is me and my group; posted with their permission!

School K

In school K, we worked with every grade level, we had 3 groups, group A which was the kindergartens, level B, which was grades 1-3, and group C which was grades 4-6. The students had read the OK Book by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, the students then were assigned to stations, created by us, the student teachers. Each station had different physical activities the kids were to do, our station was scoops. The teachers were to come up with the level 1 difficulty of their activity and the kid to come up with the remaining levels. This was inspired by the I Love a Challenge by Dark Horse Athletic, where each level gets progressively harder. The students loved this!

Part 2 of the stations was to come up with a poem that coincided with what our station was called. The students did not quite understand this portion, but rather wanted to write their level challenges on the poster, here is what the kindergarten group came up with

School G

In school G we only worked with one grade 2 class, for this class we took the students off the school property and walked down to a local lake to do a scavenger hunt as well as we created our own Leaf Man by Loid Ehlert story! During the walk there, we got to learn a lot about the kids that were in our group, as they all loved to chat! When we arrived at the local lake, we spent about 15 minutes looking for the items on the scavenger hunt list, and worked as a team to find things, and cross them off the list. After this was done, the kids collected leaves, sticks, rocks, or anything they wanted to add to their leaf man creation. Once they had collected everything they wanted to use, the teachers took photos of them, and we walked back to the school. When we got back to the school, we used the app ChatterKid to animate our leaf creations to make them talk, the kids spoke into the iPad, and said their favourite part of learning outside, which in term had the leaf creation say it out loud. The kids also really loved this.

Here were my groups creations:

In all, both of the activities were similar, but also very different. I chose to use the scaffolding method of comparison from the textbook Pathways to Understanding: Patterns and Practices in the Learning-Focused Classroom by Laura Lipton & Bruce Wellman to demonstrate each of the experience’s individualities, as well as the commonalities between the 2! Here is what I made:

Scaffolding Algorithm Reflection

I think the learning could be extended for both of these school activities by perhaps going into more detail with the ELA portion of the activities, where the kids would have to write their own version of the poem for the K school, and then for the G school, the kids would have to not only speak into the iPad, but also write it down, to return to the teacher after the activity was complete. Overall, I really enjoyed how there were many different subjects in school incorporated into this activity, like art, ELA, PE, science, history and probably more the deeper you investigate it! I think Take Me Outside Day/Week is a great idea and I hope it is something that continues until I have my own classroom!

Thanks, blog!
See you next week <3

Ms. Ella