We were SO lucky to have the weather we did for our alternative outdoor education team teach. I also feel extremely lucky to have gotten to work with Tiffany and Meghan on this assignment, as their hard work, passion and enthusiasm made it easy to enjoy both the planning and execution of this assignment.

I think the biggest thing I took away from this assignment, is that no matter how much careful planning you think you’ve done, it’s very easy to forget things if they’re not written down. Even though we had discussed amongst ourselves safety things like being near roads, and boundaries of the actual scavenger hunt, on the day it’s easy to get sort of caught up/overwhelmed and forget to mention every little detail you had in your mind.

This extended as well to our actual written lesson plan, which had many areas left incomplete and we were asked to resubmit. It really hammered home the point that the more detailed your planning is, the better the lesson is going to go. If we had remembered to write down the safety side of our lesson, we might not to have forgotten to say anything about it during our teach.

I must say, I was really impressed with everyone’s enthusiasm and willingness to put themselves out there, especially during our animal game. You are all amazing hedgehogs! We also realized that it’s important to be flexible and able to think on our feet in case activities don’t work out as we had expected them to in our head (i.e. giving some of the ‘animals’ that had been turned ‘vaccines’ so that the tag warm up activity lasted a bit longer). Hopefully we will get to do our yoga cool down activity at some point over the next few months, but if we don’t – please everyone just remember to take 5 minutes out of your day to practice focusing on your breath, and staying mindful and positive. Many people in our cohort are or have been sick lately, and I just want to reiterate again (I know I know, we keep hearing this) how important balance is. Sometimes just taking the five minutes to unplug, sit outside in nature and practice mindful breathing and thoughts is as refreshing as a good nap. It’s ideal we are able to get our students outside and enjoying the amazing air in BC!

All the best of luck to the next group in their team teach this week!

Isis

This week I greatly enjoyed our outdoor experience, from the group teach to our walk and then doing the discussion outside I found it all to be very engaging. It was interesting to see how Isis, Meghan and Tiffany executed a scavenger that was both active and informative. I could see students having a lot of fun with the animal tag and the scavenger hunt and it is something I would never have thought of for PE! I thought the walk that we did was a nice way to spend the morning, and it encouraged me to consider how I would lead a class outdoors. It occurred to me during the walk that it’s easy to say you are going to take your class outdoors but is another thing to actually do it. It’s true that children these days don’t go outdoors as much as they used to and I am a true believer that just being outdoors enhances education, however to go outdoors for a class does require some extra planning. It made me think about how untrusting we are in this day and age, and how just thinking about taking a class outside brings up a lot of liabilities and hazards, of course there are ways of minimizing these but it is a real obstacle. In my teaching career I plan to embrace outdoor education, it’s beneficial for all of us and just the change in scenery often makes for an exciting learning experience.

Hello Everyone,

This week our group readings primarily discussed the benefits of flexibility in the classroom. Sienna was my group leader for the reading summaries and she demonstrated, and taught well, the importance behind flexibility in a lesson plan. We were reminded that although we might have a set goal in our lesson that it is OK to go off the track and be adaptable in our learning environments with our students.  For instance, Steve did this at the end of our nature walk on Wednesday. Although he had planned for us to continue back to UBC in a particular direction out of the forest, he had recognized and listened to our request to continue our walk in the woods back to school; Steve altered his plan to fulfil our needs. As a class, we were able to spend more time in the forest and we adapted our end of class reading summaries to be  conducted outside since we were short on time. I think, just like life, the ability to be flexible is so important for our personal well-being and also our cognitive development. Flexibility teaches us about internal spaces that we might be unfamiliar with. It allows us to see other sides to situations and also helps to decrease our stress-levels as we become more comfortable with adapting to new scenarios. Recognizing that humans are different in their needs and wants helps an educator to understand that lesson plans are not guaranteed  ‘step by steps’ and rather, are more of a blue print for the ‘big idea’ and ‘set objectives’. Relative to our walk in the forest, nature shows us that a tree is meant to grow straight and tall; it has a goal to reach the sun. Looking closely at the underlying process that occurs in it’s soil, you can observe how flexibility is beneficial for the trees growth. Random stones and life in the soil create new scenarios that roots have to be flexible and adaptable for so that water is possible to obtain for growth.  Taking this into the classroom, always be ready and open to taking your lesson off the track.