You'll Find Plenty of Science to Study in Your Own Back Yard
by Bernice Hauser
Primary Education Correspondent"Why are we forsaking the forest for the trees?" I lamented while visiting a classroom for five and six year-olds at St. Andrews Montessori School in England last May.
The unit of study focused on the rain forest. Though the activities, discussions, projects, and trips undertaken were appropriate cognitively and emotionally to these young children, I did question the validity of choosing so esoteric and alien an environment to them when the surrounding area had various forests, lakes, creeks, hills, dales and canals, a deer forest had been created only four miles away, and only three miles away was a pig farm. Original stone walls and stone cottages with thatched roofs abounded in the community, and one mile away were two beautiful streets of single family dwellings which had been abandoned due to their sinking into land which had formerly been a marsh.
It is a known fact that young children need repeated forays into unfamiliar terrain to make it familiar and fathomable to them. They need to recreate and re-enact repeatedly events and sequences in order to validate them to themselves. Can they touch the vegetation of the rain forest, smell its foliage, sketch its animals, photograph its vistas, sample its soil, encircle its trees, feel its dampness and humidity, and experience its darkness? I think not. In all fairness to the teacher, they did visit an exhibition in the London Museum, they did view an exceptional nature movie, and they did create a "mock rain forest" in the classroom.
But think of the potential for learning in all those sites just a stone's throw from the school! An interactive, interrelated panoply of learnings can be ongoing -- interviewing officials and their parents about the abandoned dwellings, mapping, diagramming, making discoveries in the soil, learning about the stages of pigs' development, taking photographs, and surveying.
Home Spring 97 Full Screen
The TEACHERS CLEARINGHOUSE FOR SCIENCE AND SOCIETY EDUCATION