The First Field Trip

"In our schools, students often tell us they don’t want to write… Instead of assuming that writing will always be a dreaded activity – and therefore pushing, luring, motivating, bribing and requiring our students to write – we must ask, “How can I establish conditions within which my students will want to write?” …We can start by helping our students realize that the process of writing involves living wide-awake lives – seeing, hearing, noticing and wondering." ~ Lucy Calkins: one of the creators of the writers' workshop method and founding director of the influencial Teachers College Writing Project.

Lucy Calkin's guidelines for a strong writing program are echoed in the principles of placed-based environmental education programs. As a foundation for ecological development, children must be encouraged to live "wide-awake lives," explore their environment with all of their senses and be supported in understanding and celebrating their discoveries.

The first field trip for Partner Schools is the Farm and Wilderness Program. This program focuses on awakening students' curiosity about their surroundings, developing appreciation and empathy for local animals and plants, and supporting students' feelings of comfort in the Hidden Villa environment. During the day students explore the forest trails, investigate the children's garden and meet friendly farm animals. They take on new challenges and learn about the connections between their discoveries and their own lives.

Your students' experiences at Hidden Villa during this first field trip can be the starting point for a variety of academic projects at school. However, because you will have the opportunity to develop a year-long relationship with Hidden Villa, I strongly recommend that you focus your integrated curriculum after this first field trip on those projects that support David Sobel's first stage of development.

For many students the field trip will act to "establish conditions" within which they will be more inspired to write. Validate the importance of your students' field trip experiences, discoveries, adventures, challenges, accomplishments and insights by asking your students to share them in reflection surveys, personal narratives or poetry. Or, extend their developing sense of empathy for the animal inhabitants of their local ecosystem by asking them to take on the character of one of these animals and write a fiction story from this perspective.

In response to Byrd Baylor's children's book, I'm in Charge of Celebrations, Lucy Calkin's writes: "We human beings are in charge of celebrations. Writing allows us to hold our life in our hands and make something of it."

In my mind this quote does not just mean that students produce finished drafts of stories, poems or reports, but that writing extends their understanding of their lives and of their life experiences. As environmental educators in the school classroom, our goal after a hands-on experience should be to support our students in creating meaning from these experiences. Therefore, it is my view that - particularly in the upper elementary grades - environmental education and Writer's Workshop go hand-in-hand.