Reflection 7
2 years ago 12
GuidelinesforReflections11.docx
HumanGeoinKindergarten.pdf
GuidelinesforReflections11.docx
Guidelines for Reflections/Reactions…
1. The reflection/reaction paper is well organized and structured into paragraphs that build upon one another...it’s not just a huge chunk of text.
2. The author has included two burning questions at the conclusion of the essay. Rather than merely fulfilling a requirement, the burning questions reflect the thoughtfulness of the author and represent an engagement with the text or some sort of application to one’s developing practice, schools, society, etc.
3. The essay has been proofread and is free of grammatical errors, run-ons, spelling errors, etc.
5. It is clear from the reflection that the author has read the text.
6. The essay is a full page in length, single spaced, with one inch margins and there has been no effort to carve out space through the creative formatting of titles and headings!
7. The reflection was turned in on time.
HumanGeoinKindergarten.pdf
4 Social Studies and the Young Learner
A Trip to the Boiler Room: An Experiential Approach to Human Geography in Kindergarten Simon Jorgenson, Scott Howard, and Brianna Tyler Welch
Today more than ever, teachers must prepare young learners to understand and address complex social and environmental problems. Many of these problems are directly related to how humans use natural resources to meet their needs. This is a core concept in geography and geography education.
The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework sug- gests that by the end of second grade students should be able to “Compare how people in different types of communities use local and distant environments to meet their daily needs,”1 which is an ambitious standard for young learners due to the complex concepts and skills it involves. This article describes how Scott, who was then a kindergarten teacher at Milton Elementary School in Milton, Vermont, and Brianna, a preservice teacher from the University of Vermont in Burlington, co-taught an inquiry-based project that prepared students to meet this learn- ing objective through experiential education methods. Milton Elementary School is the largest K-5 elementary school in Vermont, with approximately 800 students.
Scott and Brianna began with the basic belief that before young children could think about distant communities and environ- ments, they needed to learn, from experience, about people and places much closer to home. The heart of the project was a winter field trip to the school’s boiler room, where students learned from the mechanic about the wood-chip fueled heating system that kept their school and classroom warm.
Out of the Classroom and into the World The use of field trips to teach social studies was common during the progressive era of the early 1900s. One of the leaders of this movement was Lucy Sprague Mitchell, founder of Bank Street College of Education in New York City. In her 1934 book Young Geographers, Mitchell described a geography curriculum for young children based entirely on field trips, beginning with local
trips in kindergarten that built upon children’s knowledge of home.2 Through this process, she believed that children would learn to appreciate the people and places involved in meeting their daily needs. Mitchell called this pedagogy “human geogra- phy” to emphasize the personal relations between children and workers that she believed were central to social studies learning.
Mitchell’s experiential approach has recently been revived by Salvatore Vascellaro, a social studies teacher educator at Bank Street College of Education in New York City. In his 2011 book Out of the Classroom and into the World, Salvatore Vascellaro describes a time when he was an elementary teacher and the heat failed in his classroom.3 This event led him to realize how little he and his students knew about the school’s heating system and the person who cared for it. In response to this, he designed a field trip to the school’s boiler room, an experience that inspired the human geography project described in this article.
Readers of Social Studies and the Young Learner will cer- tainly be familiar with field trips as an approach to social studies education. Articles in Social Studies and the Young Learner such as “Civics in the Grocery Store: A Field Trip of Awareness and Agency” and “‘Tomb It May Concern’: Visit Your Local Cemetery for a Multidisciplinary (and Economical) Field Trip” continue to suggest new locations and social contexts for carry- ing on this pedagogical tradition.4 The trip to the boiler room described below shows how the kindergarten classroom—and field trips that never leave the school grounds—can be just as engaging to young learners as trips further afield while providing a strong relational foundation for further social studies learning.
Designing the Inquiry Prior to implementing the project, Scott and Brianna made three design decisions to frame the inquiry. First, based on the Inquiry Arc described in the C3 Standards, they chose a
Social Studies and the Young Learner 30 (4) pp. 4–11
©2018 National Council for the Social Studies
March/April 2018 5
continued on page 8
compelling question. Where does the heat in our classroom come from? This question was chosen for its potential to drive the inquiry and tie together the different locations and people involved in the process of heating the school. Second, they decided that they would invite students to construct support- ing questions themselves, with some guidance, and use these student-generated questions to interview the school’s boiler mechanic. Third, they decided to begin the unit by building connections between students’ home and school experiences through a classroom read aloud, connections the class had discussed in the weeks prior.
With the design framework in place, the team turned to addressing the nuts and bolts of planning the trip itself. Scott secured permission from children’s parents and guardians and support from the school principal. The principal introduced him via email to the boiler mechanic in the district, Mr. Paradise, who agreed to be interviewed by students and lead a field trip to the boiler room. A few days later, Scott met Mr. Paradise in the boiler room where they discussed site preparation, safety concerns, and behavior management and confirmed a date for the classroom interview and field trip. The process of imple- menting each of these ideas—the read aloud, the classroom interview, the trip to the boiler room—is described below.
Come Over to My House The inquiry commenced with the reading aloud of a book. Brianna had learned through her teaching internship that Scott’s kindergarten class, an energetic and talkative bunch, were par- ticularly interested and engaged when books were read aloud. This proved to be the case when she gathered them together to listen to her read Come Over to My House, which creatively discusses the similarities between children’s home experiences in a diversity of houses, cultures, places, and environments, from Africa to the Arctic.5 The goal was for students to begin thinking about their classroom as a kind of house, a place where people live and play and have their daily needs met. The central theme of the book is that children share a common need for food, water, shelter, and friendship regardless of where they happen to live. The book includes a series of pages that illus- trate some children at home beside a wood-burning fireplace, others beside a wood-burning stove:
Come over to my house and sit by the fire. My fire burns trees and it’s hotter and higher. Our fire’s in a stove. It makes beautiful heat. Come over! Come over and warm your cold feet.
In the discussion that followed her reading of the book, Brianna asked questions designed to connect students’ home
experiences to the people and places portrayed in the book. Did you connect with any of the houses in this book? How were they different? Were any of them like your friend’s house? Do you have a stove or fireplace at your house? What does it burn? Brianna ended the discussion by asking students to draw pictures of the houses where they lived and was surprised by how many students included trees and other aspects of the natural environment in their pictures.
Where is the Warmness Coming from? On the second day of the project, Scott gathered the students together again for a classroom discussion. The goal of the dis- cussion was to invite students to consider how their daily needs were being met at school, and in the classroom, just like at home. The primary challenge for Scott was guiding the discussion in such a way that students became personally compelled by the question of where the heat in their classroom came from. Through a series of teacher questions and student answers, everyone in the class became focused on the heat exchanger in the classroom, which students called the “heater.”
“How does the classroom keep us safe? It protects us!” “Why do the windows have to be closed? So we don’t get
cold and frostbite.” “What is keeping us from getting cold and frostbite?
Warmness.” “Where is the warmness coming from? Heaters!” “Where’s the heater?” All point. All listen. “What sound does it make? It sounds like ocean water. It
sounds like a fan.” Scott ended the discussion by pointing out how many interest-
ing questions students had about the heater in their classroom. Who could we talk to that would help us answer our questions? The class decided that they should talk to the school’s heater expert.
A Visit from a Heater Expert Two days later, Mr. Robert Paradise, Licensed Tradesman with the Milton Town School District, visited the classroom. Prior to his visit, Scott introduced the concept of an interview to the class and used a puppet to model basic interview protocols such as when to ask a question and when to listen for an answer. Students agreed that good interview questions asked the person being interviewed to share something personal about themselves and/or something they knew. With Scott’s guidance, students developed a series of questions to ask the school’s heater expert.
How does the heater in our classroom work? How do you make the heater? How do you get coins and stuff like that out of the heater? How does the air come inside the heater? What color is the fire in the heater? What comes out of the heater?
6 Social Studies and the Young Learner
Social Studies and the Young Learner 30 (4)
©2018 National Council for the Social Studies
Mr. Paradise, Scott, and Brianna led the children outside, down the sidewalk beside the playground, and across the parking lot to the boiler room door.
Once inside, Mr. Paradise showed the children each of the components of the school’s heating system, beginning with the heart of the system, the firebox.
March/April 2018 7
Social Studies and the Young Learner 30 (4)
©2018 National Council for the Social Studies
The final activity of the project invited students to share what they had learned by drawing a picture that answered the question that had framed their inquiry from the beginning. Where does the heat in our classroom come from?
Here are two examples from those drawings.
8 Social Studies and the Young Learner
Does the heater have a fan?
When Mr. Paradise arrived, he said that it was unusual for him to be in a classroom when the children were there too. Most of the time he was there alone he said, when the heater needed to be adjusted or fixed.
During the interview, the students asked Mr. Paradise all of the questions they had prepared and others that they had not. By listening to Mr. Paradise’s answers, the students became familiar with unseen and previously unexplained forces in their classroom. They learned many things. The heater made noise because it was blowing fresh air into their classroom to keep them healthy during the winter months, not recycled air from the classroom, as they had thought. But the air outside was cold. How could that work?
Mr. Paradise explained that the heat that students felt in the air blowing from the heater came from hot water that ran through one of the big white pipes that was connected to the heater. The other white pipe they could see coming out of the heater carried cold water back to the school’s boiler room. That’s where the water got hot. The water moved in a big circle through the pipes. Did the class want to go see the boiler room?
A Trip to the Boiler Room The boiler room at Milton Elementary School is located in a brick building adja- cent to the school. In between is the school playground. Following the interview, and after putting on their winter gear, Mr. Paradise, Scott, and Brianna led the children outside, down the sidewalk beside the playground, and across the parking lot to the boiler room door, where they stopped to discuss behavior and safety expectations prior to going inside. Mr. Paradise had already prepared the boiler room for their visit, making sure that the space would be safe and comfortable for young children.
Once inside, Mr. Paradise showed the children each of the components of the school’s heating system, beginning with the heart of the system, the firebox. He explained that the black box on top of the firebox was called a boiler and that this boiler was filled with tubes of water that the fire in the firebox made very hot. He showed them the pipe that took the hot water out of the boiler room and explained that this pipe ran under the school playground and into the school, where it connected with other pipes that took the hot water to each of the classroom heaters, including the heater in their classroom.
Next, Mr. Paradise showed the children the wood chips that were burned by the fire in the firebox to make the water that ran through the tubes in the boiler hot. He explained that these wood chips were the “fuel” that burned to make heat. The chips were harvested from Vermont trees in a place not far from the school and the same wood chips were on the school playground. He also explained that the wood chips “took a bath” in water before being burned in the firebox and that this bath made them burn hotter and cleaner than if they were dry. Each of the children had a chance to touch the wood chips and feel their dampness.
Then, Mr. Paradise showed the children the blue conveyor belt that took the wood chips up and into what was called
a “hopper” that dumped the wood chips into the firebox. He opened the door of the firebox so that everyone could see the wood being burned and feel the red-orange heat.
To help the students connect the different places and processes they were experienc- ing in the boiler room, Scott invited them to repeat the following out loud and all together while they stood in front of the open firebox:
The wood chips are fuel. The fire is burning. The heat is rising. The heat makes the water boil. The water goes under the playground And into the school, Into the classroom heaters To make the air warm for us!
Before heading back to the school, Mr. Paradise took the children outside and showed them two big rooms in the same
building where the wood chips waited before going up the conveyor belt and into the firebox.
Mr. Paradise also showed them where the big truck parked that delivered the wood chips to the school from the place where they were harvested. Everyone walked back to the school with a new appreciation for how their classroom was connected to the boiler room, to the playground, to the trees, and to the work of Mr. Paradise.
Representing the Experience Creating maps and other representations is essential to how children learn to connect human activities that occur in dif- ferent places.7 Experiential educators have recognized the importance of representation, as clearly described by John Dewey. Representations are also a great way for teachers to see what young children have learned from a geography field experience.
The approach
described in this
article provides a
way for teachers
to address this
challenge through
experiential
education methods
while meeting the
ambitious goals for
geography education
set out in the C3 Framework.
TRIP TO THE BOILER ROOM from page 5
March/April 2018 9
With these ideas in mind, the final activity of the project invited students to share what they had learned by drawing a picture. Rather than having students draw a picture of the boiler room itself, Scott and Brianna asked them to draw a picture that answered, as best they could, the question that had framed their inquiry from the beginning. Where does the heat in our classroom come from?
Each student was given a blank sheet of white paper and a choice of colored pencils or crayons as a medium. As students were working, Scott and Brianna provided encouragement and support. They asked each student what they were drawing a picture of and wrote down what they said on the back of each picture. This provided another way for Scott and Brianna to ‘see’ what students were thinking and found most relevant and important.
Many drew pictures of the conveyor belt carrying wood chips to the firebox and pipes carrying water in and out of the boiler. Several drew themselves and their classmates watching the wood chips move and the fire burn. One drew a picture of Mr. Paradise fixing the classroom heaters. Another drew a swing on the playground with a pipe running underground from the boiler room building to the school.
This assessment activity made clear that the majority of stu- dents in the class now knew where the heat in their classroom came from. They knew that their school community used trees from the local environment to meet their daily need for heat in the winter. They had also learned that this process depended on the care and competence of Mr. Paradise, who was no longer a stranger to them. Thank you cards were in order!
Conclusion Teaching geography to young children can be challenging due to the abstract and conceptual nature of the content. The approach described in this article provides a way for teachers to address this challenge through experiential education methods while meeting the ambitious goals for geography education set out in the C3 Framework. Many elementary schools have a boiler room nearby and boiler mechanics who would be eager to share their experience and expertise with students. If not a boiler room, all schools have a heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system of some kind to maintain air quality and keep students comfortable. Each school also has social and technical systems to meet students’ daily needs for food, water, sanitation, and safety.
These school-based systems are excellent contexts for similar social studies inquiries driven by similar questions. Where does the water in our school come from? Who grows the food in our cafeteria? Who keeps us breathing fresh air? What keeps our classroom cool when it’s hot outside? How did people keep a school house warm in the old days? These trips provide young learners with personal and tangible insights into how they are connected through their daily needs to the natural and social environments that constitute their world. With this foundation in
place, young learners are much more likely to recognize similar patterns in distant environments and communities as they grow older and their world begins to expand.
Acknowledgement We thank Robert Paradise, Licensed Tradesman, Milton Town School District and Mary Fitzgerald, Principal, PreK-2 at Milton Elementary School for supporting this project and joining us on our field trip. Milton Elementary School serves as a university field-experience school in collaboration with the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont. We appreciate all of the MES teachers who have hosted preservice teachers over the years.
Notes 1. NCSS, The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies
State Standards: Guidance for Enhancing the Rigor of K-12 Civics, Economics, Geography, and History (Silver Spring, MD: NCSS, 2013), 43.
2. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Young Geographers (New York: Basic Books, 1934). 3. Salvatore Vascellaro, Out of the Classroom and into the World: Learning from
Field Trips, Educating from Experience, and Unlocking the Potential of Our Students and Teachers (New York: New Press, 2011).
4. Erin Adams, “Civics in the Grocery Store: A Field Trip of Awareness and Agency,” Social Studies and the Young Learner 27 no. 4 (2015): 16–18; Eric Groce, Rachel E. Wilson, and Lisa Polling, “‘Tomb It May Concern’: Visit Your Local Cemetery for a Multidisciplinary (and Economical) Field Trip,” Social Studies and the Young Learner 25, no. 3 (2013): 13–17
5. Theo LeSieg, Come Over to My House (New York: Collins, 1967). Theodor Seuss Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) wrote under several pen names; books authored by LeSeig (which is “Geisel” backwards) were illustrated by artists other than himself.
6. LeSieg, 22–25. 7. NCSS, 41. Relevant learning objectives for geography, Dimension 2, “Applying
disciplinary tools and concepts” with regard to “human-environmental interac- tion”:
D2.Geo.1.K-2. Construct maps, graphs, and other representations of familiar places. D2.Geo.6.K-2. Identify some cultural and environmental characteristics of specific places. D2.Geo.8.K-2. Compare how different types of communities use local and distant environments to meet their daily needs.
Simon Jorgenson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont.
Scott Howard, a Third Grade Teacher at the Integrated Arts Academy in Burlington, Vermont, taught at the Milton Elementary School at the time of this project.
Brianna Tyler Welch is an undergraduate student in the Dual Endorse- ment Program in Elementary and Special Education at the University of Ver- mont in Burlington, Vermont.
GuidelinesforReflections11.docx
Guidelines for Reflections/Reactions…
1. The reflection/reaction paper is well organized and structured into paragraphs that build upon one another...it’s not just a huge chunk of text.
2. The author has included two burning questions at the conclusion of the essay. Rather than merely fulfilling a requirement, the burning questions reflect the thoughtfulness of the author and represent an engagement with the text or some sort of application to one’s developing practice, schools, society, etc.
3. The essay has been proofread and is free of grammatical errors, run-ons, spelling errors, etc.
5. It is clear from the reflection that the author has read the text.
6. The essay is a full page in length, single spaced, with one inch margins and there has been no effort to carve out space through the creative formatting of titles and headings!
7. The reflection was turned in on time.
HumanGeoinKindergarten.pdf
4 Social Studies and the Young Learner
A Trip to the Boiler Room: An Experiential Approach to Human Geography in Kindergarten Simon Jorgenson, Scott Howard, and Brianna Tyler Welch
Today more than ever, teachers must prepare young learners to understand and address complex social and environmental problems. Many of these problems are directly related to how humans use natural resources to meet their needs. This is a core concept in geography and geography education.
The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework sug- gests that by the end of second grade students should be able to “Compare how people in different types of communities use local and distant environments to meet their daily needs,”1 which is an ambitious standard for young learners due to the complex concepts and skills it involves. This article describes how Scott, who was then a kindergarten teacher at Milton Elementary School in Milton, Vermont, and Brianna, a preservice teacher from the University of Vermont in Burlington, co-taught an inquiry-based project that prepared students to meet this learn- ing objective through experiential education methods. Milton Elementary School is the largest K-5 elementary school in Vermont, with approximately 800 students.
Scott and Brianna began with the basic belief that before young children could think about distant communities and environ- ments, they needed to learn, from experience, about people and places much closer to home. The heart of the project was a winter field trip to the school’s boiler room, where students learned from the mechanic about the wood-chip fueled heating system that kept their school and classroom warm.
Out of the Classroom and into the World The use of field trips to teach social studies was common during the progressive era of the early 1900s. One of the leaders of this movement was Lucy Sprague Mitchell, founder of Bank Street College of Education in New York City. In her 1934 book Young Geographers, Mitchell described a geography curriculum for young children based entirely on field trips, beginning with local
trips in kindergarten that built upon children’s knowledge of home.2 Through this process, she believed that children would learn to appreciate the people and places involved in meeting their daily needs. Mitchell called this pedagogy “human geogra- phy” to emphasize the personal relations between children and workers that she believed were central to social studies learning.
Mitchell’s experiential approach has recently been revived by Salvatore Vascellaro, a social studies teacher educator at Bank Street College of Education in New York City. In his 2011 book Out of the Classroom and into the World, Salvatore Vascellaro describes a time when he was an elementary teacher and the heat failed in his classroom.3 This event led him to realize how little he and his students knew about the school’s heating system and the person who cared for it. In response to this, he designed a field trip to the school’s boiler room, an experience that inspired the human geography project described in this article.
Readers of Social Studies and the Young Learner will cer- tainly be familiar with field trips as an approach to social studies education. Articles in Social Studies and the Young Learner such as “Civics in the Grocery Store: A Field Trip of Awareness and Agency” and “‘Tomb It May Concern’: Visit Your Local Cemetery for a Multidisciplinary (and Economical) Field Trip” continue to suggest new locations and social contexts for carry- ing on this pedagogical tradition.4 The trip to the boiler room described below shows how the kindergarten classroom—and field trips that never leave the school grounds—can be just as engaging to young learners as trips further afield while providing a strong relational foundation for further social studies learning.
Designing the Inquiry Prior to implementing the project, Scott and Brianna made three design decisions to frame the inquiry. First, based on the Inquiry Arc described in the C3 Standards, they chose a
Social Studies and the Young Learner 30 (4) pp. 4–11
©2018 National Council for the Social Studies
March/April 2018 5
continued on page 8
compelling question. Where does the heat in our classroom come from? This question was chosen for its potential to drive the inquiry and tie together the different locations and people involved in the process of heating the school. Second, they decided that they would invite students to construct support- ing questions themselves, with some guidance, and use these student-generated questions to interview the school’s boiler mechanic. Third, they decided to begin the unit by building connections between students’ home and school experiences through a classroom read aloud, connections the class had discussed in the weeks prior.
With the design framework in place, the team turned to addressing the nuts and bolts of planning the trip itself. Scott secured permission from children’s parents and guardians and support from the school principal. The principal introduced him via email to the boiler mechanic in the district, Mr. Paradise, who agreed to be interviewed by students and lead a field trip to the boiler room. A few days later, Scott met Mr. Paradise in the boiler room where they discussed site preparation, safety concerns, and behavior management and confirmed a date for the classroom interview and field trip. The process of imple- menting each of these ideas—the read aloud, the classroom interview, the trip to the boiler room—is described below.
Come Over to My House The inquiry commenced with the reading aloud of a book. Brianna had learned through her teaching internship that Scott’s kindergarten class, an energetic and talkative bunch, were par- ticularly interested and engaged when books were read aloud. This proved to be the case when she gathered them together to listen to her read Come Over to My House, which creatively discusses the similarities between children’s home experiences in a diversity of houses, cultures, places, and environments, from Africa to the Arctic.5 The goal was for students to begin thinking about their classroom as a kind of house, a place where people live and play and have their daily needs met. The central theme of the book is that children share a common need for food, water, shelter, and friendship regardless of where they happen to live. The book includes a series of pages that illus- trate some children at home beside a wood-burning fireplace, others beside a wood-burning stove:
Come over to my house and sit by the fire. My fire burns trees and it’s hotter and higher. Our fire’s in a stove. It makes beautiful heat. Come over! Come over and warm your cold feet.
In the discussion that followed her reading of the book, Brianna asked questions designed to connect students’ home
experiences to the people and places portrayed in the book. Did you connect with any of the houses in this book? How were they different? Were any of them like your friend’s house? Do you have a stove or fireplace at your house? What does it burn? Brianna ended the discussion by asking students to draw pictures of the houses where they lived and was surprised by how many students included trees and other aspects of the natural environment in their pictures.
Where is the Warmness Coming from? On the second day of the project, Scott gathered the students together again for a classroom discussion. The goal of the dis- cussion was to invite students to consider how their daily needs were being met at school, and in the classroom, just like at home. The primary challenge for Scott was guiding the discussion in such a way that students became personally compelled by the question of where the heat in their classroom came from. Through a series of teacher questions and student answers, everyone in the class became focused on the heat exchanger in the classroom, which students called the “heater.”
“How does the classroom keep us safe? It protects us!” “Why do the windows have to be closed? So we don’t get
cold and frostbite.” “What is keeping us from getting cold and frostbite?
Warmness.” “Where is the warmness coming from? Heaters!” “Where’s the heater?” All point. All listen. “What sound does it make? It sounds like ocean water. It
sounds like a fan.” Scott ended the discussion by pointing out how many interest-
ing questions students had about the heater in their classroom. Who could we talk to that would help us answer our questions? The class decided that they should talk to the school’s heater expert.
A Visit from a Heater Expert Two days later, Mr. Robert Paradise, Licensed Tradesman with the Milton Town School District, visited the classroom. Prior to his visit, Scott introduced the concept of an interview to the class and used a puppet to model basic interview protocols such as when to ask a question and when to listen for an answer. Students agreed that good interview questions asked the person being interviewed to share something personal about themselves and/or something they knew. With Scott’s guidance, students developed a series of questions to ask the school’s heater expert.
How does the heater in our classroom work? How do you make the heater? How do you get coins and stuff like that out of the heater? How does the air come inside the heater? What color is the fire in the heater? What comes out of the heater?
6 Social Studies and the Young Learner
Social Studies and the Young Learner 30 (4)
©2018 National Council for the Social Studies
Mr. Paradise, Scott, and Brianna led the children outside, down the sidewalk beside the playground, and across the parking lot to the boiler room door.
Once inside, Mr. Paradise showed the children each of the components of the school’s heating system, beginning with the heart of the system, the firebox.
March/April 2018 7
Social Studies and the Young Learner 30 (4)
©2018 National Council for the Social Studies
The final activity of the project invited students to share what they had learned by drawing a picture that answered the question that had framed their inquiry from the beginning. Where does the heat in our classroom come from?
Here are two examples from those drawings.
8 Social Studies and the Young Learner
Does the heater have a fan?
When Mr. Paradise arrived, he said that it was unusual for him to be in a classroom when the children were there too. Most of the time he was there alone he said, when the heater needed to be adjusted or fixed.
During the interview, the students asked Mr. Paradise all of the questions they had prepared and others that they had not. By listening to Mr. Paradise’s answers, the students became familiar with unseen and previously unexplained forces in their classroom. They learned many things. The heater made noise because it was blowing fresh air into their classroom to keep them healthy during the winter months, not recycled air from the classroom, as they had thought. But the air outside was cold. How could that work?
Mr. Paradise explained that the heat that students felt in the air blowing from the heater came from hot water that ran through one of the big white pipes that was connected to the heater. The other white pipe they could see coming out of the heater carried cold water back to the school’s boiler room. That’s where the water got hot. The water moved in a big circle through the pipes. Did the class want to go see the boiler room?
A Trip to the Boiler Room The boiler room at Milton Elementary School is located in a brick building adja- cent to the school. In between is the school playground. Following the interview, and after putting on their winter gear, Mr. Paradise, Scott, and Brianna led the children outside, down the sidewalk beside the playground, and across the parking lot to the boiler room door, where they stopped to discuss behavior and safety expectations prior to going inside. Mr. Paradise had already prepared the boiler room for their visit, making sure that the space would be safe and comfortable for young children.
Once inside, Mr. Paradise showed the children each of the components of the school’s heating system, beginning with the heart of the system, the firebox. He explained that the black box on top of the firebox was called a boiler and that this boiler was filled with tubes of water that the fire in the firebox made very hot. He showed them the pipe that took the hot water out of the boiler room and explained that this pipe ran under the school playground and into the school, where it connected with other pipes that took the hot water to each of the classroom heaters, including the heater in their classroom.
Next, Mr. Paradise showed the children the wood chips that were burned by the fire in the firebox to make the water that ran through the tubes in the boiler hot. He explained that these wood chips were the “fuel” that burned to make heat. The chips were harvested from Vermont trees in a place not far from the school and the same wood chips were on the school playground. He also explained that the wood chips “took a bath” in water before being burned in the firebox and that this bath made them burn hotter and cleaner than if they were dry. Each of the children had a chance to touch the wood chips and feel their dampness.
Then, Mr. Paradise showed the children the blue conveyor belt that took the wood chips up and into what was called
a “hopper” that dumped the wood chips into the firebox. He opened the door of the firebox so that everyone could see the wood being burned and feel the red-orange heat.
To help the students connect the different places and processes they were experienc- ing in the boiler room, Scott invited them to repeat the following out loud and all together while they stood in front of the open firebox:
The wood chips are fuel. The fire is burning. The heat is rising. The heat makes the water boil. The water goes under the playground And into the school, Into the classroom heaters To make the air warm for us!
Before heading back to the school, Mr. Paradise took the children outside and showed them two big rooms in the same
building where the wood chips waited before going up the conveyor belt and into the firebox.
Mr. Paradise also showed them where the big truck parked that delivered the wood chips to the school from the place where they were harvested. Everyone walked back to the school with a new appreciation for how their classroom was connected to the boiler room, to the playground, to the trees, and to the work of Mr. Paradise.
Representing the Experience Creating maps and other representations is essential to how children learn to connect human activities that occur in dif- ferent places.7 Experiential educators have recognized the importance of representation, as clearly described by John Dewey. Representations are also a great way for teachers to see what young children have learned from a geography field experience.
The approach
described in this
article provides a
way for teachers
to address this
challenge through
experiential
education methods
while meeting the
ambitious goals for
geography education
set out in the C3 Framework.
TRIP TO THE BOILER ROOM from page 5
March/April 2018 9
With these ideas in mind, the final activity of the project invited students to share what they had learned by drawing a picture. Rather than having students draw a picture of the boiler room itself, Scott and Brianna asked them to draw a picture that answered, as best they could, the question that had framed their inquiry from the beginning. Where does the heat in our classroom come from?
Each student was given a blank sheet of white paper and a choice of colored pencils or crayons as a medium. As students were working, Scott and Brianna provided encouragement and support. They asked each student what they were drawing a picture of and wrote down what they said on the back of each picture. This provided another way for Scott and Brianna to ‘see’ what students were thinking and found most relevant and important.
Many drew pictures of the conveyor belt carrying wood chips to the firebox and pipes carrying water in and out of the boiler. Several drew themselves and their classmates watching the wood chips move and the fire burn. One drew a picture of Mr. Paradise fixing the classroom heaters. Another drew a swing on the playground with a pipe running underground from the boiler room building to the school.
This assessment activity made clear that the majority of stu- dents in the class now knew where the heat in their classroom came from. They knew that their school community used trees from the local environment to meet their daily need for heat in the winter. They had also learned that this process depended on the care and competence of Mr. Paradise, who was no longer a stranger to them. Thank you cards were in order!
Conclusion Teaching geography to young children can be challenging due to the abstract and conceptual nature of the content. The approach described in this article provides a way for teachers to address this challenge through experiential education methods while meeting the ambitious goals for geography education set out in the C3 Framework. Many elementary schools have a boiler room nearby and boiler mechanics who would be eager to share their experience and expertise with students. If not a boiler room, all schools have a heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system of some kind to maintain air quality and keep students comfortable. Each school also has social and technical systems to meet students’ daily needs for food, water, sanitation, and safety.
These school-based systems are excellent contexts for similar social studies inquiries driven by similar questions. Where does the water in our school come from? Who grows the food in our cafeteria? Who keeps us breathing fresh air? What keeps our classroom cool when it’s hot outside? How did people keep a school house warm in the old days? These trips provide young learners with personal and tangible insights into how they are connected through their daily needs to the natural and social environments that constitute their world. With this foundation in
place, young learners are much more likely to recognize similar patterns in distant environments and communities as they grow older and their world begins to expand.
Acknowledgement We thank Robert Paradise, Licensed Tradesman, Milton Town School District and Mary Fitzgerald, Principal, PreK-2 at Milton Elementary School for supporting this project and joining us on our field trip. Milton Elementary School serves as a university field-experience school in collaboration with the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont. We appreciate all of the MES teachers who have hosted preservice teachers over the years.
Notes 1. NCSS, The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies
State Standards: Guidance for Enhancing the Rigor of K-12 Civics, Economics, Geography, and History (Silver Spring, MD: NCSS, 2013), 43.
2. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Young Geographers (New York: Basic Books, 1934). 3. Salvatore Vascellaro, Out of the Classroom and into the World: Learning from
Field Trips, Educating from Experience, and Unlocking the Potential of Our Students and Teachers (New York: New Press, 2011).
4. Erin Adams, “Civics in the Grocery Store: A Field Trip of Awareness and Agency,” Social Studies and the Young Learner 27 no. 4 (2015): 16–18; Eric Groce, Rachel E. Wilson, and Lisa Polling, “‘Tomb It May Concern’: Visit Your Local Cemetery for a Multidisciplinary (and Economical) Field Trip,” Social Studies and the Young Learner 25, no. 3 (2013): 13–17
5. Theo LeSieg, Come Over to My House (New York: Collins, 1967). Theodor Seuss Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) wrote under several pen names; books authored by LeSeig (which is “Geisel” backwards) were illustrated by artists other than himself.
6. LeSieg, 22–25. 7. NCSS, 41. Relevant learning objectives for geography, Dimension 2, “Applying
disciplinary tools and concepts” with regard to “human-environmental interac- tion”:
D2.Geo.1.K-2. Construct maps, graphs, and other representations of familiar places. D2.Geo.6.K-2. Identify some cultural and environmental characteristics of specific places. D2.Geo.8.K-2. Compare how different types of communities use local and distant environments to meet their daily needs.
Simon Jorgenson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont.
Scott Howard, a Third Grade Teacher at the Integrated Arts Academy in Burlington, Vermont, taught at the Milton Elementary School at the time of this project.
Brianna Tyler Welch is an undergraduate student in the Dual Endorse- ment Program in Elementary and Special Education at the University of Ver- mont in Burlington, Vermont.