Issue link: https://trevordayschool.uberflip.com/i/998876
1 4 T R E V O R D AY S C H O O L n W I N T E R 2 0 1 6 – 2 0 1 7 Learning Central Park: IN Lisa Alberti Associate Head of School and Interim Director of Lower School W hile New York City has been home for my entire adulthood, I was raised in a rural town in western Massachusetts and spent much of my childhood outside, surrounded by and interacting with the natural world. My mother believed that fresh air and unstructured, unsupervised play built strong bodies and character—and conversely, sitting inside watching television would destroy minds and souls. (She was a Bennington grad.) In hindsight, I realize she also sometimes wanted the three of us out from underneath her feet! Summers, school-day afternoons, and weekends—essentially any time I was not in school—I spent exploring. With a steep hill, field, stream, and pond on our property, my siblings and I grew knowledgeable about biology and the interdependency and life cycles of insects, fish, frogs, turtles, herrings, and ducks. Without even realizing that we were doing so, we studied physics as we dammed streams and determined the optimal number of bodies to create the top speed for our toboggan to slide down the hill. Decomposition of leaves and birds taught us the rudiments of how nature recycles. I arrived in New York City just after college and was hired as a Kindergarten assistant teacher at Trevor (then e Day School). To my surprise, the head teacher gave me the responsibility of planning the science curriculum. I had no formal experience with curriculum planning, but had a fairly strong, innate sense of how to bring learning experiences to the young student; indeed, that was what brought me to teaching. Yet, given my personal connection with science, I was initially truly baffled as to how to make science come alive for my students in the "cement city." I quickly learned that nearby Central Park offered a place to explore, experiment, and fuel the curiosity of young learners. We used hammers to break rocks apart and extract the mica from the Manhattan mica schist (one of the city's five bedrock layers). We dug up earthworms and brought them back to school and created a "wormatorium," researching what this interesting invertebrate needs as a habitat. We studied the similarities and differences between acorns First Graders' YearlonG immersion