In my class, we tackle building vocabulary in several ways: through context in reading, context in speaking, memorization, word games, and more. One particular student of mine absolutely bombed last week’s vocabulary in a bad way. After completely failing to learn the words, he evidently felt bad and took it upon himself to apologize to me and promised he’d do better next week (the apology wasn’t necessary, of course, because his learning is for himself and not for me, but I appreciated the gesture. It was also only day 5 of the school year, and I don’t know that I have convinced him that I am not a teacher that will take his lack of effort personally, but will instead only push him to work for his own betterment…but that will come with time). This week, though, he took the initiative and stayed after school for an hour studying with me, he completed his word practice early, studied with his mom, and told me he went through the words while lying in bed each night. He ACED those words this week. You should’ve seen his face when he was able to use those words correctly and in a way that contributed meaningfully to our class. This kid now has those words in his working vocabulary and has experienced that incredible feeling of learning and growing. MAN, we teachers live for those moments.
It is always easier to build on previous success than to start from scratch, and you better believe that this young man is going to be able to continue using the strategies that worked for him and by the time this year is done, his vocabulary will have exploded.
We build on success in problem solving skills, exercises in teamwork, speeches, debates, in 20% time, genius hour, and passion projects. We build on success in our jobs, in our relationships, in our homes, in our communities.
Just like this student is able to build on his success from the past week, my team of Kenan Fellows are building on the work that last year’s eMammal group began. They started the process of bringing the program into classrooms and my team and I are able to develop that further. We created a base “lesson” that any teacher interested in doing eMammal in their classroom will use. That lesson holds introductions to the program, space for student inquiry, and ultimately, sets the teacher and student up to go deeper into the many facets of eMammal.
We’re developing lessons for eMammal to be implemented in math, art, and humanities classes. Ultimately, the goal is to have students meaningfully interacting with their physical environments in all their classes. Kids will be able to see that all disciplines work together to provide deep understanding of any given topic. We believe participating in eMammal will help students develop empathy and appreciation for mammals, and even more broadly, nature.
It will be interesting to see how different our revised lessons will be from our current theoretical and not-tried-yet lessons. The success of our lesson plans will lie in our team’s ability to troubleshoot and rework.
Our lessons that we’ve developed are useful because kids are able to work with the data that we’re collecting. They’re doing close readings on predators and invasive species. They’re seeing the animals that live, hunt, play, and sleep right around them.
My class practiced setting up the cameras on Friday. Next week, we will begin our first official deployment. As teachers, we strive to expose students to enduring understandings about life through various activities. It is our hope that our students will, by doing real science, come to understand the interconnectedness of human beings and their environments, appreciate and take an interest in mammals, and sincerely gain a curiosity for all things citizen science.