Kids Respond to Nature!

     Every year we take the 6th grade students to Outdoor School or Science Camp for a week, Monday to Friday.  I’ve always thought that it was a great experience for the students as they get to have “hands-on, experiential approach to science education, and focus on adventure, self-discovery, and environmental stewardship”.  They get to explore different eco-systems such as the redwoods, marsh, beach, oaks, and meadows to name a few. 

    This year, as I looked at the program through the EFL principles, I was able to understand the benefits of this experience in even more depth.  The students mellowed with their exposure and close contact with nature.  The jaded facade that they had begun to wear as they grew use to middle school melted away and their childhood wonder came out to shine. What a great experience! 

Buddhist Mani Wheels plus Calming My Energy

     We are still studying India in Social Studies.  We finished with Hinduism and are now learning about Buddhism.  We continue with our yoga and meditation.  The students, even the wiggly ones, are sometimes so quiet during our 5 minutes of meditation.  Some are getting very aware and peaceful.  Others are able to at least relax and honor the quiet and silence in their own way.
    One project that I copied from another 6th grade teacher at our school to make what we are learning more experiential is having the students make ‘Buddhist Mani wheels or prayer wheels’.  They are easy to make and we learned a lot about Buddhist beliefs from doing this activity.  I’m learning also, since I was not familiar with this practice.

    All we used was a toilet paper roll, yellow construction paper the same height as the roll,  the chant ‘Om Mane Padme Hum’ in Sanskrit printed on plain paper, glue, and markers.  The roll is then twirled on a pencil.  It was very easy to make, and fun!
I let the students pick what they were comfortable writing.  Some possible choices were

1. Paste the Sanskrit chant on roll and write the chant in our English alphabet.
2. Write the universal qualities that the chant symbolizes, such as generosity, compassion, tolerance, patience, perseverance, concentration, and wisdom. (I had to research the meaning.)
3. Write your own prayer or wish for yourself and others.
4. Write the qualities that you are trying to reinforce in yourself.

    Also, remember the energy chart I posted on the wall of my classroom?  (see Feb. 2nd blog) Well, I think I’m the one using it the most.  It’s in the back of my classroom and I stare at it as I’m in front of the class teaching.  I’ve needed many reminders to ‘raise my energy’ as my 6th graders enter their ‘will years’ with the surge of hormones they are experiencing.   Fortunately, I’m taking Usha Dermond’s online Education for Life class this semester and I’ve already learned ways to quickly relax and center myself so that I can clearly address the challenging situations that come up in public school.

Visiting Living Wisdom School

As the first semester ended and the second half of the year loomed ahead I was feeling in need of some EFL inspiration. Luckily, Nitai’s four day visit to the Palo Alto Living Wisdom School (LWS) began with his talk on Consciousness in Education this last Saturday. Forty parents and educators attended from many private and public schools for a very full classroom.  Students from the Living Wisdom high school also came to inspire everyone with their lovely music.

 Unfortunately, I missed the Monday visit to the school, which included more students from both the LWS middle school and high school from Nevada City, CA.  However, I had the chance to visit LWS on Tuesday while Nitai was still there. I visited the different classrooms and found ideas, insights, and creativity. The LWS Palo Alto students, inspired by the music of the older students from Nevada City, performed their own wonderful music while I was there.

     After such a great visit, I went back to my classroom reinvigorated and shared some of the ideas with my students.  They had been curious when I told them that I was going to a school that was based on yoga.  They asked, “Do they do yoga or do they study it?”

Yoga and Meditation:
    When I returned from my visit I told them about how the LWS students start their day with yoga exercises and meditation.  I wanted to have my students also start the class with yoga and relaxation.  This news was greeted with a few dramatic groans by some and enthusiasm by others but I could tell they were all curious.  Since we are now studying India, Hinduism, and Buddhism in social studies this was right on target with the curriculum.  This week at the beginning of class we practiced 5 minutes each day of hatha yoga - doing Tadasana (Mountain Pose), Chandrasana (Moon Pose), and  Trikonasana(Triangle Pose).  We are only doing the standing poses for now, mainly because of space limitations.  The yoga was followed the first day by 2 minutes of meditation while the students watched the breath (they thought this felt like a long time).  The second day we tried 3 minutes.  I did this with both my morning and afternoon class with varying results.  The most successful was the afternoon class where roughly 90% of the students seemed to do it with ease.  The students want to increase the number of minutes that we relax or meditate and I plan to continue with this throughout the school year. I’ll let you all know how it goes.

Energy:

    I also shared with them the concept of “energy”.  I told them that at the LWS school the teachers and students talked about the “energy level” of the students, teachers, classroom.  I asked them what they thought “energy” meant in this context and using their words  and vocabulary (with a bit of guidance) we came up with a chart for describing the different energy levels that we experience in ourselves. I made a chart for the wall because I will be referring to that concept and using the vocabulary we developed to help them focus their energy throughout the rest of the school year.  I tied it all back to the ‘Personal Excellence Qualities’ that we have talked and written about all year, explaining that the highest levels of our energy are represented by those high qualities.  We will continue to explore this useful concept of energy.

Sharing Education for Life

          This first week back at school I had the opportunity of sharing the Education for Life program with my colleagues.  It gave me the opportunity of reflecting on what I have learned from EFL so far this school year.  Having to tell others about it made me think deeply about the difference in my teaching since my exposure to this program.
     


          When I started using EFL back in September I told our school principal what I was attempting to do in my classroom.  He, in turn, asked me to share it with the staff.  At our first staff meeting of 2013 I gave a short presentation about this new approach.  I also wanted to inform them of the upcoming free talk by Nitai Deranja that is happening in a couple of weeks on January 26 in Palo Alto.  If you live in the San Francisco bay area I highly recommend going to this event! 
http://www.anandapaloalto.org/joy/Consciousness_workshop_with%20Nitai.pdf
   
As I looked back at what I had done so far this school year I noticed that I had been using EFL in my classroom on the four distinct levels that made sense to me.

1.      I’m constantly checking to see if what I’m doing is experiential.  Are the students learning through their own experience?  In planning my lessons I try to make sure that what they experience allows them to use all the ‘tools of maturity’: physical, feeling, will, intellect.  This allows everyone to learn through their dominant tool.
2.     Now more than ever I focus on the positive, I follow the joy.  I notice when the students are the most engaged, enthusiastic, interested.  I’ve learned that one of the things that points us to our highest potential is our passion or our level of engagement and joy in a subject.  This includes, me, the teacher!
3.     I’ve also been basing my teaching on expansiveness.  There is a way to measure an individual’s expansiveness by using what EFL calls Progressive Development or a person’s Specific Gravity.  With the model of Specific Gravity I can gauge the level of energy behind a student’s actions, this gives me clues as to how to motivate and teach that student.  I learned that other words for energy in this context might be “consciousness or intention”.
4.     Of course this is all student centered or a better phrase is “child oriented”.  In other words, the student is more important than the curriculum.  I cannot just throw the curriculum at them.  As the teacher, I need to constantly discern my students’ abilities and what is appropriate and expansive for each of them to bring them to a higher level. 

A Festival of Light

   We have wonderful diversity of cultures and traditions represented at our school.  Our students’ families are from all over the world every continent is represented except Antarctica.  Therefore, the holiday season means different things to different students.  We honor these different traditions in many ways at our school, specially in this last week before our Winter Break.  In my classroom I wanted to focus on the shared tradition of “Light” during this time of the year.  So many cultures and traditions have Light as a theme in their holidays.  Most even have some sort of “Festival of Light”.  Well, in Social Studies we are still in ancient Egypt so I was curious.  Did the Egyptians have a Festival of Light?  To my great surprise they did.  Herodotus, a Greek historian in BC tells of the festival of Lychnocaia, “the lighting of lamps”.  Lamps were lit in rows on the outside of houses around this time of the year to help Osiris find his way back from the underworld.

    I shared this information with my students.  I also found some wonderful pictures of the different expressions of light in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, as well as the story of Egypt and light in the natural world.  We brainstormed to understand what Light symbolized.  The students thought it symbolized: peace, happiness, life, power, energy - these were their words.  I told them that I wanted us to experience some type of celebration of Light but that I knew we could not have lit candles in school since it would be a fire hazard.  We could, however,  have a string of lights.  Thanks to help from Erika Glazzard, a fellow EFL teacher, I had come up with a lovely plan.  We would make a walking spiral of light that would lead the students to its center where they could pick up a glass stone that would symbolize a personal excellence quality that they wanted to nurture in themselves in the coming year.  I needed a focal point of light at the center so I brought in an angel that I had from my daughters' childhood.

 
     The visual experience of having the lights on the floor was beautiful.  It was like walking inside our Milky Way Galaxy.  I played Pachelbel’s Canon in D for music in the background as each student made their own way into the heart of the lights.  After every one had a turn we sat around and had a few minutes of silence as we all tried to expand our own heart’s light.  I’ve asked the students to keep their glass stone to remind them of that special quality that they want to nurture in themselves.
   

Plants Have Feelings Too.

Food made from wheat.

   Lately I feel like I am in a time warp.  Even though the winter holidays are upon us in present time in my Social Studies class we are in ancient Egypt 3000-2000 BC.  We have been studying agriculture as we left Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent to visit Egypt and the Nile Valley.  Both cultures boasted advances in agriculture in ancient times.  Since I’m always looking for ways to have my students experience what they are learning I decided that we needed to spend more time in the garden.  One teacher had already planted wheat so that the students could watch the wheat cycle through out the year.  After we went out to observe the five inch tall wheat the students said a bit surprised, "It looks like grass!"  Following this, we had a pot luck where students could only bring foods that were made out of wheat.  We ate as we watched a video on wheat production from planting to bread on the table.

    We waited for the seasonal heavy rains to stop before we went out to the garden to see what else we could find.  The students had a focus; they needed to observe plants and take notes.  I find that they concentrate and calm down if they have a purpose to focus their energy.  Some of the boys still were excited by the dirt, mud, and water, especially since someone in the past months had dug a tantalizing moat complete with water as they were trying to reproduce an example of irrigation.  One student was intrigued by the mushrooms growing and wanted to show us how mushroom caps once put on paper and left to dry will unburden themselves of spores leaving a magical dusty ring.  I love it when the students are the teachers.  We also found many other cool things growing like strawberries, broccoli, cabbage as well as the remains of the summer tomato plants.  We also found empty soil beds crying to be used.

    I chose fava beans for the students to plant because they can be a cover crop feeding nitrogen to the soil or we can let them propagate and have fava beans to eat- hopefully right around the time we study Greece and Rome.  Also, each bean is big and each student can plant one bean and have their own plant.  I explained to the students that plants have feelings and that they need to be treated with kindness, respect, and gratitude.  This was a new concept to some of them but their hearts naturally responded.  I asked them to talk to their bean seed while they were waiting their turn to plant it.  To encourage their little baby to grow.  It was so enjoyable to see what they did with this suggestion.  One student named her bean “Stewart” so then many others named their beans.  One boy planted his bean, stayed to talk to it some more, and ended up 'teaching' his bean math and singing!  A group of girls got carried away and decided that their beans would marry and adopt some of the other beans.  I tried to get them to wait until their plants were fruit bearing age before they married them off but they did not want to wait.  After school apparently they got together to make invitation cards for the wedding and went out at lunch the next day for the ceremony.  This is all making us learn, smile, and laugh big time!
    I’ve also suggested to the students that they bring a present to their plant like a dry leaf, a handful of compost, a worm for its soil.  We will be going out and visiting our plants and watching them grow.  How wonderful to live in mild California climate and be able to do this in December.  Thank you Mother Nature.

Grammar, Symbolism, and EFL

    I’ve always loved teaching. What’s amazing is how much more I’m enjoying my job now that I’m trying an EFL approach in my classroom.  I find myself chortling at some of the teaching ideas and situations that come up with EFL.

    Take grammar for instance.  I’ve been plugging allow with my students teaching the required grammar lessons.  However, I’ve been trying different experiential ways of having the students practice the grammar concepts they are learning.  My goal is to engage all the students and their different tools of maturity to make sure that all are learning through their natural inclinations - physical, feeling, will, or intellect.  After trying several activities for our grammar lessons the most popular one involved skits.   They needed to learn/review the specifics of pronouns.  I found an activity that got them up out of their seats, engaged, and taught them to label and identify 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person pronouns.  They were divided into groups of 6 to put on a short skit. 
There were limitations:
2 people could only speak using 1st person pronouns such as I, me mine, we, us, etc.
2 of them could only speak in 2nd person pronouns, you, your, yours. 
Of course, the last 2 needed to speak in 3rd person using he, she, it, they etc. 
They loved it! They thoroughly enjoyed performing and coming up with very silly skits which also helped them learn to identify pronouns.


    It also turns out that symbolism keeps coming up.  Ever since the students worked on finding their own personal animal symbol (see Nov. 12 posting) the concept of symbolism keeps working its way into our lessons.  As we studied ancient Mesopotamia and the beginning of writing in pictographs and the ancient writing of cuneiform the students began to realized the importance and prevalence of symbolism.  Mental ideas from the realm of thoughts were brought into this material world through symbolic pictures that evolved into cuneiform writing on clay tablets in Sumer long ago.  Thanks to watching a fellow teacher, David Riordan, I was reminded of this experiential  project that I hadn’t done in a long time.  The students needed to make their own pictographs or picture symbols and write a message on a clay tablet.  I gave the students the recipe for Salt and Flour Clay and the option of extra credit.  About two thirds of my students had fun over their week long Thanksgiving break creating a message in their own invented pictographs.  One student came to school and told me that he had left his tablet to cool after taking it out of the oven and his dog ate it!  His dog really did eat his homework!

    The last helpful activity I want to mention is the reading of a popular picture book to my classes.   Unfortunately, like many other public middle schools we have problems with students being inappropriate and mean to each other.  I decided to share with my students the book, Have You Filled a Bucket Today?, which I had seen at the EFL family summer camp in Laurelwood, OR.  I’m finding that picture books are a fine literary medium even for middle school students.  My sixth graders love having a picture book read to them and this book engaged their heart qualities of caring and kindness.  I told them that they could understand and enjoy the concepts in picture books on a deeper and more mature level.  They now know that “filling someone’s bucket” is using symbolism and metaphor for making others feel good through acts of compassion.  Their homework was to go out and fill others' “buckets” through kind acts.  The next day they wrote about their experiences in their journals and came back with stories to share that reminded us of all the meaningful ways that we can reach out to others and make their day more joyful.