In the woods at the Waseca School

Last year at Waseca, we began taking our elementary (6-9) class out in the woods with our Coyote mentor, Evan McGown who co-authored “Coyote Guide to Connecting to Nature”.  I shared that experience with Evan and the class during our weekly “wild Wednesdays” and learned so much by watching him take the children to their edge of comfort and make them forget about their fears with games and questions that peaked their curiosity about the natural world.   I watched them grow as an interdependent community as they learned to cooperate with one another.  I saw children who were challenged with social and sensory integration issues indoors find their way in the larger space and shine.   Our shared experiences bonded us in a way that I have never witnessed before in 28 years in the classroom.

The method, so beautifully explained in “Coyote Guide”, involves certain core routines that make up the structure of the program.  The emphasis is on the child's experience through interacting with the environment.   This approach will surely sound familiar and comfortable to Montessorians.  Some of the core routines involve beginning and closing every day in the woods with a gratitude and sharing circle, finding and naming landmarks, working on internal mapping and survival skills, storytelling and practicing moving like animals.  Questions are more important than answers.  We want to stimulate curiosity rather than get across any specific information.  Naming something for the children can stop the process of inquiry.  Instead, we take note of characteristics and look it up in the field guides later.
As the elementary class embarks on their second year of “wild Wednesdays”,  I am satisfying my curiosity about how to take this amazing approach to the primary class.  I realized that a different plane of development would require some modifications.  Many of the games the elementary children play involve directions that would baffle younger ones.  I get to be a pioneer in this venture by observing and meeting their needs while stretching their comfort level and sparking their natural curiosity as well as stretching their senses.  I am excited to share this journey with you in coming installments with memories and updates about the elementary class as well.

Three and four year olds are drawn to sensorial experiences. They were quick to participate in getting camouflaged by covering one another in pine straw. This happened spontaneously the week after the coyote guide covered herself in pine straw.  First, they observed and, then, they remembered and imitated.
  

While part of the elementary experience is to wander through the woods to discover new places and come upon familiar ones, I chose to create a special path for the primary classes.  I cleared any briars but left fallen logs and other obstacles to navigate.  I tied white string around saplings at intervals to mark the path.  We walk this path and are reassured by its familiarity.  The children enjoy being able to predict what is coming up next.  They come to the place where we always tell a story and their recognition prompts them to ask for a story.  Places are connected to routine events.  Later, we can change and remark on how we are doing it differently.  For now, it speaks to their needs.
We devised a new game to address some challenges we were having and, at the same time, meet the needs they were expressing.  The children had difficulty outside of the classroom raising their hands and waiting to be called upon and wanted to speak all at once.  They wanted to run ahead on the path instead of waiting for the guide to lead.  They had a hard time with the concept of hiding and would stand in plain view when asked to hide.  (This probably has something to do with their egocentric perspective and inability to imagine someone else's view of them.)  Hiding in the woods is an excellent way to have the children experience being quiet and still in the woods.  After lots of experience, they will one day be able to sit quietly and wait for wildlife to appear.  When we play "rabbits and foxes", you have to put up bunny ears and be silent to be chosen as a rabbit. Now, we use this as a sign to be quiet and listen.

Silence instead of "I want a turn!"

  The rabbits run off with a guide while
the foxes close their eyes.

The rabbits hide with the guide in excited

anticipation as they wait

for the foxes. A biit of adrenaline accentuates the experience.

The guide makes a crow call when the rabbits
are hidden
and the foxes take off after them!

Caught by a fox!

            

Part of being a coyote guide is to play the trickster, observing the children and challenging them in new ways.  In the beginning, we hid just off the trail, making it easy for the foxes to spot us.  After several weeks, we hid deeper in the woods and they ran right by!  After the foxes ran out of sight, I made the crow call again.  This time, they had to look more closely and the rabbits had to be very still and quiet.  Hopefully, they will learn to slow down and pay attention as they come after us.  We practiced what that would look like, turning our heads from side to side, listening and watching for small movements.

Shadow Puppets

We are currently working on our annual shadow puppet for the Waseca School holiday festival and basing the story on this gorgeous book.http://www.chroniclebooks.com/titles/over-and-under-the-snow.html

"Over the snow, the world is hushed and white. But under the snow exists a secret kingdom of squirrels and snow hares, bears and bullfrogs, and many other animals that live through the winter safe and warm, awake and busy, under the snow."

New biome reader masters available!!

The third step in using the biome readers is to make a book for the child to illustrate and demonstrate their comprehension.  It is their own book that they can take home to share with their parents how they can read and what they are studying at the same time.  The format we have been sending out requires legal size paper and must be rather time consuming to copy.  I have noticed that the teachers at my own school were not making the books available to children.  So I came up with a new format on regular 8 1/2 x 11 paper that you can cut down six pages using a cutting guide, staple the right hand side and have six copies of a book.  I hope that this makes the job a lot easier.

We have stored the masters in the internet cloud and you can take this link to find them. Be sure to get the cutting guide as well.

http://cl.ly/3g3A1w012x0I1t3x0a3z

Cutting Guide

http://cl.ly/3X0t0w3D183b2z0d2I1t

South America Biome Reader Masters

http://cl.ly/3Y2e2J3x0n0J123p2g1w
North America Biome Reader Masters

http://cl.ly/3Z0Z0i3u031K1B3G0F01
Europe Biome Reader Masters

http://cl.ly/1I0m2O2G1p3e3R3z2O3X
Africa Biome Reader Masters

http://cl.ly/3E2q3y1z2j1r3V2p0k0U
Australia Biome Reader Masters

http://cl.ly/2s3S3J1u0L3q0j3O1Y3G
Asia Biome Reader Masters

The Alpine Ibex from the Europe Readers

Recycling at Nature's Way Montessori

As I travel to different Montessori schools giving the biome workshop, I find some very innovative practices and projects that I would like to share with you.

At Nature's Way Montessori in Knoxville Tennesse,
this is their recycling center in each classroom.
The top two cans are for paper and plastic.  The bottom
two cans are for brown paper towels and compost.
When you place anything in thee wastebasket, you
have to acknowledge where you are sending it.

..............an introduction...........

I would like to try my hand at writing a blog for those of you who teach the biome curriculum.  My intention in doing so is to share my ideas with you and to share your ideas, discoveries, and experiences with others who have brought the biomes into their classrooms.  For the past five years, I have been traveling and giving workshops on the curriculum.  I feel your enthusiasm and your need to network with other educators.   By traveling and networking with others, I find new ideas to incorporate into my vision of a Montessori cultural curriculum rich in environmental education and integrated across the boundaries of isolated subject matter.   

I feel there is a potential grassroots movement towards a saner, more sustainable way of living in closer connection to the natural world and I want to be a part of that and a facilitator in connecting people who feel the same pull.  As educators, we are all in a position to impress impressionable young minds with a different message than the one our modern culture is transmitting to us.   Our culture would have us believe that we are a species above the laws of nature and entitled to unlimited use of the earth’s resources.  Children live in such a state of disconnection with the natural world that they don’t even realize that it is nature that provides them with everything they need to exist.  We think of nature as uncomfortable and even dangerous.  And, yet, for thousands of years we, as a species, have lived in close connection to the natural world.  The past two hundred years since the industrial revolution entails a very recent “experiment” in living behind glass in temperature-controlled environments with all of our food transported from remote soils to be processed and packaged for us to pick up at the grocery store.  The media has further removed us from direct experience of any kind and isolated us in front of screens to live our lives virtually.  In his book, Last Child in the Woods Richard Louv warns us that there are serious repercussions to this “experiment”.   When I first started teaching 28 years ago, I didn’t see children with sensory integration issues or such problems with attention and concentration.  Now it is prevalent along with physical problems such as asthma and obesity.  Our children are calling for help.  We don’t need to dwell on these tragic circumstances any longer than it takes to recognize the need to reclaim our connection to nature.

Nature heals.  We have only to make the time and the space in our lives and in our schools to experience it, to allow it to provide us with what we need to live happy and healthy lives.

As I have traveled around giving the workshop and sharing environmental education materials to be used in the classroom, I always encouraged guides to take the exploration outdoors but I couldn’t tell them how to do that.  I only knew that it was a missing piece to what I had to offer and that indigenous cultures were the model to observe.  About a year ago, I spent a weekend in the woods with a group of people to be initiated into an art called “Coyote Mentoring”.  Evan McGown had written a book with a man named Jon Young called Coyote Guide to Connecting with Nature.  Young is an anthropologist who studied the process of how native children develop their connection to nature through mentoring by elders.  I instantly recognized this approach as the missing piece I had been looking for.  I enlisted Evan to lead our lower elementary class into the wild one day each week.  Since then, I have become very involved in getting children outdoors to have their biological button pushed, their senses integrated, and their minds and spirits awakened in awe of nature.  This year, we are bringing our primary classes into the forest and out on the field.

I am discovering, firsthand, how to integrate these outdoor experiences with the biomes curriculum to make it even more experiential for children.  I would very much like to share this journey with you and all of the amazing benefits that I observe.   I also hope that you will send me your stories and experiences so that I can share them with our biome community.  We have some very important work to do and we need to stay connected.  Remember that nothing and no one exists in isolation and that we are all connected. 

Sincerely,

Sharon Duncan

.............waseca catalogue

waseca catalogue

..........thoughtful chimp