This week with EKTEP we had the opportunity to have two in-situ days at different local elementary’s. They were super fun and very engaging, the kids seemed to be really excited with both the ‘We Love a Challenge’ and using the app Chatterkid to to create a talking animal out of things we find in nature.

For the first in-situ we had the students go through a story book walk for ‘Take me Outside Day’ and then incorporated ‘We Love a Challenge’ with the EKTEP students. We all had different stations, ranging from skipping to playing scoop ball. My groups station was balancing with bean bags and the challenges included balancing them on our shoulders (Kindergarten), heads (grades 1-3), and on one leg while balancing (grades 4-5). The students excelled at this and that’s when we started to ask them “can you think of any other ways to balance?” and students came up with some very creative ways such as balancing bean bags on both arms and spinning around or stacking as many bean bags on their heads as they can.

Upon reflection the younger students needed more guidance on what else they could do to balance bean bags, so maybe they would have benefitted from more visuals? The older students had a lot of fun with it and enjoyed the ‘challenge’ when we said a student balanced 10 bean bags on their head and many were determined to balance more and ended up using different strategies to achieve this.

A couple challenges did arise such as the timing of the students coming outside, sometimes we would have 20 kids at once or none at all. It was hard to figure out when to switch with other groups. As well, a lot of students didn’t understand the poem and ‘We Love a Challenge,’ so having them try and fill out the words was tough. but ended up working with some guidance. I realize it is tough if some classes don’t have time to get to a story, but I think that would have helped their understanding a tad more.

All in all, just being able to play outside and have productive fun allows for better learning for the students! I had a lot of fun and hope that in the future I can incorporate this with my classes.

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The second in-situ was a field trip to a lake with a grade 2 class, where I was paired with a co – teacher and two students! The students read the book ‘The Leaf Man’ and learned the Ktunaxa words for different animals while in class, but the teacher mentioned they had a hard time with the pronunciation and struggled a bit. In our technology class we prepared to help with the teachers lesson by reading the book, creating the animal slide show, and then using Chatterkid to learn how to navigate the app.

Once we got down to the lake we started our scavenger hunt and our group seemed super interested in it, but wanted to check mark everything off even though we didn’t see it. They also had trouble with coming up with ideas for making an animal out of nature, so we had to guide them a little and ended up making a dinosaur out of rocks!

I definitely learned a lot for future reference such as making sure boundaries are made clear and set in place for students as soon as they are able to wander around an area, and making sure that there are enough adults (parent volunteers, teachers, EA’s) around to help supervise the students. As well as teachers are responsible for who students are being picked up by and making sure they are on the list for approved pickup. Lastly, field trips have to align with the curriculum and should involve core competencies and be relevant to what you are teaching, and making sure that there is a detailed plan in place for any field trip for students who need extra help, and low (walking to a lake like we did) and higher risk activities (cross country skiing).

I had a lot of fun this week with in-situ’s and can’t wait for more!