Tuesday, September 23, 2014

The third grade class that used to be 112 last year- my oceanographers- is missing their WELL art time with me.  Since they are in the room next door, I set up the tiny hallway between our rooms with a provocation. If they have free time, they will be able to come out into the quiet area and work on a drawing.  It says, "Can you draw how it feels?" and I've placed seashells and the cattails and thistle plants out there.

Today was a day of mostly portraits. We are nearly finished with most of the portraits at each grade level.

103 had a special experience. We went for a walk in the back lot of our school, to prepare them for nature walks over to the nature trail. We talked about using our senses and tried to sit for ten seconds in silence to see what we could hear. We will increase this time as the year progresses, hoping for a full minute or two of silence by the end of the year. Today, we heard wind, a train, cars, and the rustling of leaves. We thought we heard mermaids, unicorns, and whales, but we talked about our role as scientists and sometimes it's fun to hear things in stories, but sometimes we have to only talk about what we really see and hear.

 Then, we walked around to see what our eyes could see.  And we saw a LOT!

We saw flowers.  The students collected "flowers" which were mostly dandelions and other pretty weeds.

 Then we saw a butterfly. This was very exciting because the butterfly allowed us to get really close to it before flying away. When it started flying, we chased it!

After the butterfly excitement, a child shouted, "I see a snake!!!" I thought the child was kidding because we heard unicorns earlier and it's the middle of a busy, urban city.  Lo and behold, there was a real snake in the parking lot.  I believe fifty percent of us (including myself) screamed, but then curiosity overtook fear and we watched the snake slither (from a safe distance) until it went into the grass. Ms. Cich promised us that it was only a "baby garden snake" so we were in no danger. 

I see a snake! 

The snake in its snakely glory.

You'd think that was it for our encounters with living things, but we had one more surprise.  A fuzzy little caterpillar was crawling across our path!  The students decided to keep him in their bug box as a pet. They named him Fuzzy.

At this time I thought our first experience in nature was complete, but as we shared out about the experience, the students noticed the beautiful shadows that came from the flowers were were holding. This led us to "put" shadows on different things- the sidewalk, our hands, the buildling. 

In summary, in just a half-hour outdoors, we were able to see three examples of living things in our environment, play with shadows, take a relaxing break to listen to sounds and feel emotions ranging from excitement to surprise to happiness (and for a few of us, fear, with the snake!)  This half-hour is proof that taking kids outside is not a waste of time during the school day, but rather an experience to spur provocations and ideas for inquiry investigations.  We will have to review this day with the students and see what leads we can pick up on to take this and make it part of their curriculum.