First Week – Prairie Creek

[Anonymous]

Yesterday, I visited Prairie Creek Community School for the first time to observe and help out with Amy Haslett-Marroquin’s second and third grade class. The school was situated down a dirt road on a small property surrounded by farms. Most classes were outside when I arrived, either having recess time or presenting poetry to the group. When I came, Amy’s class was just headed outside for a ten minute recess break. Students were running around in the playground area and playing with balls. I also noticed a group of students in an involved game of make believe with a family, a dog, and its previous owners – very imaginative.

Following this, the students went to the other side of the school and gathered in a pavilion. There was a bit of a struggle to get the students to pay attention, as this was one of their first outside days since fall. Amy had to keep reminding the kids that though outside can be more distracting, they need to stay focused on what their class is doing. She then described the activity the students would be doing that afternoon: nature journaling. The students could draw anything out in the forest or field, as long as their drawing was a close-up. From what I observed, this activity was a good example of how to create a setting for wonderful ideas, as Eleanor Duckworth wrote about. The guidelines were open enough that students could engage in what they were interested but narrow enough to focus their attention. I think the act of looking closely sparked some questions. One student, for example, had dug into the ground and uncovered an interesting plant, which none of them could figure out what it was.

These students are 7 to 9 years old, and it did seem like most were likely in concrete operational. After the field journaling, they had a lesson on coding. In this activity, they took turns ordering each other around using four direction coding commands paired with a number of steps in that direction. They very quickly picked up on how the game worked, and understood that rt(5) meant 5 steps to the right before Amy even explained it. Some of the students had even done some actual coding themselves, which I don’t think would be possible in preoperational as coding requires a level of logic, cause-and-effect, and often reversibility to fix errors. It seems like thus far my observations could support Piaget, though I think it’s hard to say from such a short visit.

I was impressed that the school was teaching coding to second and third graders, and I wondered why they chose that topic over other, more traditional disciplines. There seemed to be potentially a school-wide focus on coding as an important skill. I wondered if this is because computer skills are/will continue to be so important into the future OR if teachers were thinking that coding is a great way to teach logic, problem-solving, trial and error, etc. It could also potentially be a way to use the computer, which can be a site for passive learning, as one for active learning.

I will be curious to see in the coming weeks how this outdoors aspect of school works. It reminded me a lot of my time working as a summer camp counselor, from the pavilion to the struggle to get kids to pay attention. I always thought that for teachers, behavioral management wasn’t always as challenging because they have an authority that counselors don’t have, school is seen as having more rules, and maybe also because summer is thought of as “fun time” (whereas school isn’t always). I’m interested to see if the kids get more used to being outside and less distracted, and if Amy will then have to do less organizing and management work, or if the summer camp atmosphere will remain. Also, we did a lot of educational sections at my camp, so I would like to think more about what the differences are between camp and school or if they could be more similar than we think (at least at an alternative school like Prairie Creek).

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