The school year has begun and while I always encourage us to
begin with just the fact that a new beginning has happened, soon after we have
just gotten a sense of who one another is and where the markers are kept, real
content with all its demands of “study me” starts to break through, for while
we are just getting a handle on the daily routine here in the classroom, the
outside world has been busy moving forward. By outside world I
mean it in the most immediate and simplistic: our trips to Triangle Park soon lead us to notice that what
look to be bees are moving in and out of a hole in the big tree in the middle
of the lawn. Before we know it, we
are getting out the books about bees, and soon we are realizing that a trip to
the P-Patch is the perfect site for learning about pollination. It is also the right place to sit down
with my class and make a bee on a stick that we can carry through the woods and
bring back to school.
Triangle Park, with its bee tree right there, though—that is
the right place to sit down with Eileen’s class and mine and read about
bees. We should also sit there and
read about “Winne the Pooh and the Honey Tree”. And, before long, we should re-gather there and read The Bee Tree by Patricia Polacco, a
wonderful “romp” of a book.
Let’s paint egg cartons to look like honeycomb and make a “hive” on the
bulletin board. All the time, we
will be learning about how they make wax and change in their hiding places in
the nest. Oh, and let’s dip apples
in honey in honor of the Jewish New Year—
hey—wait—apples!
That makes us think of the tree across the street just loaded with them,
so let’s get Tom and Kathi to go over with small groups and pick during recess
on the patio. We’ll bring the
apples in and make applesauce and eat it together and add honey for a special
treat. Thinking of the apples
across the street just growing there and needing to be picked makes us think of
all the bounty growing in all our yards and gardens at home. Everyone, bring in vegetables and fruit
and we’ll have a little market in the classroom.
A market leads to thoughts of trading and buying and
selling; get out the pretend money and have fun with “buying” real things that
we can sample right here and now.
We have tomatoes and plums and Asian pears and green grapes and even eggs
from Jordi’s chickens!
And while all of that is happening, children in Kim’s class
are taking the wagon and heading out everyday to be outdoors, too. They are noticing spiders and their
webs everywhere in the clear September mornings. So, they begin to learn about them in earnest and create wax
resist watercolor paintings to demonstrate their knowledge of the complexity
and beauty of the web’s architecture.
Bees live in a colony, a social grouping, but what about
spiders? As we begin the unit on salmon, we ask now that same question: how do salmon live?
Are they individuals, or members of a group? This is a hard question even for an adult to answer.
A trip to the South Sound to Keefe’s family’s cabin allowed
us to see young salmon in a little creek that empties into the salt water on
their property, as well as to watch adult salmon returning to a nearby hatchery,
there to spawn, and to die. We are not finished with bees, even as
we begin thinking about fish. We will
listen to “Flight of the
Bumblebee”, Rimsky-Korsakov’s classic piece of the insect in flight. We’ll draw in crayon as we do so,
imagining the bee. We are doing
something that people do, extrapolating that bee from nature and putting it on
paper, as did Kim’s children when they made their spider webs. The younger children will also get to
watercolor wash over crayon in order to learn the technique of making a wax
resist. As we do, we will focus
intensively on the way of one class, or one specie, yet, even so, at the same
time, we will add it to our
growing understanding of the interrelatedness of all things—even, I am coming
to see, all academic subjects.
When we, as
teachers, no longer separate them exclusively into pre-ordained compartments,
but hone in to get a closer look and to grow a skillset, when we teach
thematically, we learn to “telescope out”—to encompass a broader view, to see
that it is from nature, after all, that all things come. Our inspiration guides us. The engineer owes her competency to the
human thrust to recreate what the bird does with the grace of instinct. We see a spider or a salmon and we want
to draw, paint, write a novel about a web and a little pig, hear of how the
first humans on Puget Sound revered the first fish that returned each year,
know each one’s cycle of life, remember what Eileen says that makes us
ponder: “All living things
die”. As an adult, I thought of
that the other day and found, because of it, that I had a clearer sense of how
that truth makes the fact that we live even better. And then what did I make of it when I told the children in
one of our small afternoon groups, that the first people’s believed all things
lived, even stones, mountains, water and the air?
Camille Hayward
