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Date: 1/17/2023
EASTHAMPTON – With the Arcadia School Programs through the Massachusetts Audubon Society (Mass Audubon) underway in sixth, seventh and eighth grades, the Easthampton School Committee received an update on the program so far during its Jan. 10 meeting.
Kim Hoff, one of the coordinators for the Arcadia School Program, explained that the program is all about outdoor learning for the sciences.
“The purpose of this grant-funded program through the Easthampton Learning Foundation is to work with teachers and students at the Mountain View School to encourage outdoor learning, to facilitate student-led projects, to enhance outdoor learning opportunities for the whole school and to highlight the new space for the community,” she said.
Hoff said those goals have been progressed through professional development opportunities and classroom involvement currently taking place.
Laura Beltran, one of the Arcadia program coordinators, said much of the programming occurs in the sixth and seventh grade science classrooms.
“All six of the sixth-grade classes we are going to be teaching seven sessions throughout the year. In the seventh grade there are five science classes, and we will be doing nine sessions with them, six of those are learning sessions and three of those are sessions where we’ll be mentoring them because they are coming up with a class project,” she said.
Hoff explained that prior to instruction in the classroom, teachers are provided a plan for what to expect in the coming week including the topic, the concepts and an outline of the activities. She added that teachers are able to provide feedback about the plans and what may work for their students.
Hoff added that the teachers have been receptive to the program.
“All of the teachers have been incredibly supportive, enthusiastic, welcoming, helpful, we’ve had an amazing experience,” she said. “We’ve had to schedule 87 sessions throughout the school year, and I think this is the easiest scheduling we’ve had to do.”
While there are some differences in the curriculum, Hoff said the first class for both sixth and seventh grade is all about field journaling.
“So, every student has a field journal, and we did a whole class about the proper ways to collect scientific data and we did field journaling exercises both in the classroom and outside, and really got the students accustomed to how they would need to set up their journals every time they went outside to use them,” she said.
All the classes are taught based on Massachusetts standards and Hoff said at the sixth-grade level the lessons involve rocks, fossils, erosion and observing these subjects from the classroom and schoolyard. One of the sixth-grade classes involved looking at fossils, measuring dinosaur tracks and then hypothesizing what that dinosaur might have looked like.
“We’re really doing a lot of evidence-based activities, fun activities that relate them to the schoolyard, the local community and to their standards,” Hoff added.
At the seventh-grade level, Beltran said the focus has been on learning about climate change, including learning about the carbon cycle and the earth’s four spheres.
“We’ll be doing mapping of where water goes, where it is in the schoolyard, assets like the whole water gardens all around the schoolyard. For the biosphere we’ll be measuring the trees and looking at the plantings for the gardens. For the geosphere we’ll talk about the soil and the garden project, and if there is composting,” Beltran said.
For the atmosphere, Beltran said students learned about how carbon affects the atmosphere and how to limit the amount of carbon going into it.
Beltran added that along with the project the seventh graders work on for the final three sessions, they also will have the opportunity to showcase their projects to the community in a culminating event.
In eighth grade, Hoff said students are learning about the climate and had the opportunity to attend a Western Mass Youth Climate Summit at the Springfield museums. She added that in the eight grade civics classes, students will be viewing a climate democracy video and also doing a follow up on climate impacts with a walk around the school grounds in the spring.
While many of the committee members said they were impressed with the program, Marin Goldstein said he was excited to see the program grow even more.
“This is so awesome and I’m just so excited and so thankful that this is happening for our students, I love bringing in this real direct, hands-on environmental education with our students. In know they get it in other ways, but this just takes it to another level, and I wish every single one of our students had the opportunity to take this,” he said.
During the meeting, Superintendent Allison LeClair also announced that the district would be hosting a kindergarten information night on Jan. 26 from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at Mountain View School.
The Easthampton School Committee next meets on Jan. 24 and coverage of that meeting will appear in the Feb. 2 edition of The Reminder.