Where the wild things are!

We picked a beautiful fall day to take our 4th and 5th grade students to our creek. While working in our school garden is a pretty organized undertaking, venturing out to the creek often feels very different. We are out there once a month to eliminate invasive plants and plant native bushes and trees with the long term goal of crowding out the blackberries, grasses and ivy by planting native plants and bushes.

An outing to the creek is a wild adventure. Not only do we work with some serious tools, but if you have ever tried to pull ivy roots, you know that this is hard work!

Today while pulling ivy, we found bumble bees hiding under leaves and getting ready for winter. We looked at them closely  and carefully relocated them to a new save space for winter..

For me, taking our students to the creek, or to nature in general, are always special moments.

You never know what you encounter, but there is always a moment where students become excited about a discovery. There is just a lot of positive energy in our excursions..

I could name a long list of skills our students use when working together at the creek, but let’s just say they demonstrate all 5 traits of IB’s approaches to learning. Learning happens when children apply social, research, thinking, communication and self management skills. Our goal in the classroom is to prepare them so that they can apply the skills and their knowledge - at the creek, or ultimately in life.