The outdoors is not just for science classes anymore. Lynne Dorfman and Rose Cappelli, authors of Mentor Texts and Nonfiction Mentor Texts, offer some ideas for allowing students to discover nature through writing, sketches, and poetry. Children have a natural curiosity about colors and change and harvesting this energy makes for “joyous learning” and creates artist-writers with keen observation skills.
As teachers of writing, we recognize the benefits of extending our classrooms into the great outdoors – whether that is an urban, suburban, or rural setting – and allowing our students to rediscover the intricate complexities of nature with eyes of the artist-writer. With great joy, students take their nature journals to sketch, record observations, create poetry, or to write simple truths. Often such excursions outdoors occur in the spring, when teachers and students are itching to answer nature’s invitation. One of the advantages of keeping a nature journal throughout the school year is to be able to compare the subtle or sometimes more dramatic changes that occur with each season. There is as well, a comfort in knowing that change is expected, accepted, and can be quite beautiful.
We’d like to suggest two books that can serve as mentor texts to set the stage for a study of color in nature. Nature’s Paintbox: A Seasonal Gallery of Art and Verse by Patricia Thomas (2005) explores the seasons with specificity of color and word. Beginning with winter, penned in black and white, Thomas recreates each season with extraordinary description and insight. Her craft is filled with specific nouns and verbs, hyphenated adjectives, use of ellipses and dashes, variations in print, and wonderful rhymes and rhythms. Consider her extraordinary explanation of the pastel colors of spring:
blurry, furry,
baby-chick, baby-duck colors…
fresh-green-fuzzy, baby-leaf,
baby-fern colors…
soft colors, showing slowly,
perhaps so the surprise
of color in a black-white world
won’t hurt your eyes.
Red Sings from Treetops: a Year in Colors by Joyce Sidman (2009) explores how colors paint the landscapes differently depending on the season. Notice how the writer paints green:
Green is queen
in summer.
Green trills from trees,
clings to Pup’s knees,
covers all with leaves,
leaves, leaves!…
In FALL,
Green is tired,
dusty,
crisp around the edges.
Sidman’s text invites the reader/soon-to-be writer to savor words such as dolloped, squishy, lustrous, cerulean, sequined. Her use of alliteration, personification, exact adjectives, onomatopoeia, colons, ellipses, and hyphenated adjectives make this text desirable for any age level.
Invite your students to compare and contrast both the text and the artwork in these books and think about ways the authors’ observations of the seasons could help them to shape their own thinking.
As students participate in their “outdoor” classrooms, a few guidelines will make their experience more rewarding and productive. Here are some practical tips:
- Take a tour of the area students will be using and talk about some possibilities for keen observation.
- Invest in clipboards for your students so they can write in their books while standing or even leaning against a post or wall.
- Visit local paint stores to acquire sample color strips that students can use to match the subjects of their observations to a specific shade.
- Model how they can study one object from several vantage points. It would be a good idea to do a sketch here as well and include some labeling (You can share this drawing when you go back inside)
- Tell them you will be observing them, perhaps taking candid shots for a “Nature’s Walk” bulletin board display or to be included as black-and-white prints for their own nature journals. You could also create a videotape.
- Perhaps suggest trying to write in the persona of the object the writer is describing (My Light by Molly Bang, Sierra by Diane Siebert, and Voices of the Wild by Jonathan London are some good mentor texts for this purpose).
- Consider a rule of no talking in the outdoor classroom. Students should save the talk for inside when they are able to compare notes, drawings, and interesting observations and descriptions.
Searching for specific hues and tones satisfies the natural curiosity about color that children have from an early age. It helps students develop specificity in their writing and fosters a deeper appreciation of the world around them. It is joyous learning!
August 13th, 2009
Herb Broda, author of Schoolyard-Enhanced Learning, has been traveling the country for the past couple of months, visiting schools and documenting the creative ways teachers extend their classrooms into the outdoors. He made a stop in Portland, Maine, a few weeks ago for a meeting and lunch with (from right to left) Stenhouse editor Bill Varner, marketing manager Rebecca Eaton, and web coordinator Zsofi McMullin. You can retrace Herb’s steps on his journey here.
June 22nd, 2009
Herb Broda, author of Schoolyard-Enhanced Learning, has been documenting his travels during his sabbatical this spring. In previous posts he reported about a school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Columbus, Ohio. This week he shares what he saw at Granny’s Garden School near Cincinnati, Ohio. If you know of a school that is doing a great job of integrating the outdoors into learning, contact Herb at hbroda@ashland.edu.
As a part of my travels to explore how schools utilize the outdoors for learning, I met Roberta Paolo. She is the “Granny” of Granny’s Garden School near Cincinnati, Ohio. What began in 2002 with a small flower bed on a school lawn, has grown into a non-profit organization that literally surrounds Loveland City Schools’ Primary and Elementary buildings with gardens and, most importantly, provides extensive instructional support to promote outdoor learning. I encourage you to take a look at the website of this unique organization.
Recently Roberta gave me a tour of the more than 100 garden beds that have been created on the site. She also passed on some very practical tips that might be of interest to any teacher who is interested in school gardens. Here are a few ideas courtesy of Granny:
Bouquets on Wheels – This has to be one of the most beautiful examples of community outreach that I have seen in an outdoor education program. Classrooms carefully prepare fifty mini-bouquets from flowers that they have picked from their school gardens. The bouquets are then given to the local Meals on Wheels organization and provide a touch of unexpected beauty as they are distributed along with lunch to area senior citizens. Children not only feel connected to the garden, but also are experience the satisfaction of sharing beauty with others. Such a simple idea; but what a powerful activity!
Free buckets for your garden—Granny recommends using old kitty litter buckets. The big advantage—they don’t stick together when stacked!
Perennials with a purpose—Students grow perennials on the school site that are then given to help landscape Habitat for Humanity homes that are being built in the community.
Recycled plant cages—Looking for a protective cover for young plants, or a support for growing flowers? Roberta uses empty planters that had been lined with moss in a previous season. The empty wire basket serves as a perfect plant support.
Please share your unique ideas for incorporating nature into your teaching!
June 10th, 2009
Herb Broda, the author of Schoolyard-Enhanced Learning, is taking a sabbatical from teaching at Ashland University in Ohio this spring to visit schools that are using the outdoors as part of their curriculum. He will be stopping by the Stenhouse Blog to tell us about his visits and share some of his experiences at various schools. He will also share student work, along with strategies used by teachers to weave the school grounds into the curriculum. If you know of a school that is doing a great job of integrating the outdoors into learning, contact Herb at hbroda@ashland.edu.
This week I had a great visit to the outdoor classroom of Sally Massengale, an educator at Glenwood Elementary in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Although Sally shared many wonderful ideas with me, I was especially impressed with how she worked hard to build an interest in school ground exploration by creatively displaying outdoor discoveries indoors.
Sally has an amazingly simple and highly interactive way to remind children of outdoor discoveries and encourage further careful observation. Right outside of the cafeteria door, probably one of the busiest stretches of hallway in the building, Sally has put up a simple diagram of the school grounds. As students find interesting natural specimens of plants or animals, they take an index card and sketch what they saw and then, often with her help, identify what it was. The card is then placed beside the diagram with a piece of yarn that links the natural item with its location on the school grounds. The result is a frequently changing update of what has been discovered on the site. The location in a busy area of the building ensures that that many students will pause and take a look.
The map of the school grounds at Glenwood Hill Elementary School
In this same area outside of the cafeteria she has set up a simple weather monitoring display. Kids keep track of simple data like humidity, rainfall, temperature, cloud cover, etc. Although many teachers track this type of data within a classroom, Sally has made this a very public display of environmental information that everyone in the building can see. It sends a powerful message that emphasizes what is happening right around the building.
The weather monitoring station
I’m very eager to hear what you are doing at your school! Please share your unique ideas for incorporating the outdoors into your teaching.
March 16th, 2009
Herb Broda, the author of Schoolyard-Enhanced Learning, is taking a sabbatical from teaching at Ashland University in Ohio this spring to visit schools that are using the outdoors as part of their curriculum. He will be stopping by the Stenhouse Blog to tell us about his visits and share some of his experiences at various schools. He will also share student work, along with strategies used by teachers to weave the school grounds into the curriculum. If you know of a school that is doing a great job of integrating the outdoors into learning, contact Herb at hbroda@ashland.edu.
Recently I was a guest at Brookside Elementary School in Columbus, Ohio. Principal Fritz Monroe was a great host and shared many examples of how his school is using the outdoors as a springboard for teaching. I’ll be sharing more about Brookside in later posts.
Often the outdoors can be included in instruction without doing a complex or lengthy outdoor activity. Decorating one of the hallways at Brookside was some unique student artwork that utilized nature in a social studies lesson about ancient civilizations. Mr. Monroe described how the sixth grade students went outside and found small sticks that were sturdy enough to work as brush handles. They then took small bunches of pine needles and fastened them to the sticks with string. To create a neat ambience, teachers had the students take their natural brushes into the gym and turn out the lights. By the glow of flashlights (much safer than candles!) students used paint and the pine brushes to create “cave art” on large sheets of brown paper.
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Please share your unique activities that incorporate nature into the curriculum. Winter can be a wonderful time for outdoor learning!
February 2nd, 2009
What happens when test-stressed teachers and video-game addicted children take a trip down to the schoolyard?
Reviewing Herbert Broda’s recent book, Schoolyard-Enhanced Learning, Emmet Rosenfeld, a 15-year veteran English teacher and blogger on the Teacher Magazine website, says that what happens is a “meaningful natural encounter within the framework of school.”
Rosenfeld says that it is increasingly rare these days to see schoolyards with kids “clustered around a butterfly bush identifying local species.” Today’s schoolyards are more like “a forlorn soccer field near a brick building that displays a banner proclaiming, ‘This school is fully accredited.’”
He praises Schoolyard-Enhanced Learning for its real-life advice on getting administrators on board for trips outside of the classroom, for providing the “nuts and bolts” of actually leaving the classroom, and for providing clear linkages between outdoor activities and curriculum standards.
The full review appears on the Teacher Magazine website.
May 22nd, 2008