The word I took away from this week was “practical”. My partner and I decided that both of our questions need to be practical and easy for others to understand. I’m going to layout my inquiry in the form of a mind-map and branch all of the BC curriculum subjects from the main hub, ‘Outdoor Education’. From there, I want to provide tangible resources that other teachers can use to apply in their lessons during each subject. In addition to the curriculum subjects branching out from ‘Outdoor Education’, I’d like to have a bubble for classroom management techniques. I’ve found that a lot of my resources bring forward the notion of fear from many teachers towards Outdoor Education because of difficulty with managing their students. Hopefully I can remove this stigma and create more lessons inclusive to the outdoors.

I just finished writing up a lesson on heart rate for my students, which is geared towards Science, P.E., and Math. If all goes well then I’ll add it into my bucket of resources that will eventually end up on my mind map.

My partner and I are meeting with a renowned UBC professor next week to hopefully gather some insight into more resources. He runs some amazing programs at UBC, and I’m sure he’ll provide us with an abundance of material.

Chris

This weeks Inquiry class allowed me to get my head back into my inquiry project. I ended off on Christmas break with a vague idea of how to approach my topic, and meeting in groups with partners really tightened the gap to send me in the proper direction. We have like-minded questions, which made it easier to put ourselves in one-another’s shoes  and see what steps are best to take next, or what could be refined in our questions to make them manageable.

My original inquiry, ‘How does outdoor education benefit students learning and behaviors’, is pretty clear to me and I have gathered an abundance of resources on the benefits of outdoor education. I’m now going to expand on my question to include, ‘Is it possible to include outdoor education into the new BC curriculum for grades 4-7, and to what extent’. I’m hopeful that my findings will provide some useful tips and resources for myself and fellow teachers.

This week, during math I asked my students (who are data collecting and graphing at the moment), how they would like me to plan their lessons. I gave them a scale of 1-5, 1 being completely inside and 5 being completely outside. We collected the numbers and graphed them to find a strong interest for the outdoors. I hope my inquiry can provide the students with lessons they’ll look forward to!

Chris