Emergent+Curriculum

=**media type="youtube" key="96AnRRXoFGM" height="344" width="425" Emergent Curriculum**= The Bicycle Curriculum Emergent Curriculum at Park Street Intermediate School Emergent Curriculum ideas for Education 214 Joel Rides His Unicycle The idea behind emergent curriculum is to work with where the students are and to connect new knowledge to their current interests. While the curriculum is certainly designed to meet state standards and benchmarks, it is derived from where the students are in their lives in terms of their experiences and their individual psychologies. This section provides some resources on the creation of emergent curriculum.

Funds of Knowledge
http://worldowiki.wikispaces.com/Funds+of+KnowledgeOne way to look at students' interests and experiences is to consider funds of knowledge. Here is what (Carolyn) have written about it elsewhere (in a project that will probably merge with this literacy textbook). Bluegrass jam funds of knowledge part 1, Ray Sparks Bluegrass jam funds of knowledge part 2, visitors to 214

People who figure out how to play instruments on their own (and even make their own instruments) demonstrate independent, lifelong learning. They take responsibility for their learning, as opposed to waiting to be spoon-fed. One of the side effects of the focus on formal education is the unintended message that people cannot learn without a teacher. We need to actively counter this idea because the only way our students will thrive in the 21st century is to develop good independent learning skills. This is why it is good to find people who are outside the academic learning environment and to have them share their learning.

Working with Emergent Curriculum
An emerging curriculum is fueled by student curiousty. Unfortunately, sometimes out of an over emphasized concern for child safety or for moving through a perscribed curriculum, adults inadvertently teach children to ignore their curious urging to discover. Sometimes teachers need to scaffold children's curiosity. Doing so will likely allow projects for an emerging curriculum to more readily bubble up from students themselves. Since curiousity is so important to a "juicy" emerging curriculum here are some of the ideas on fostering curiosity in children shared by Marge Kennedy in [|**Work & Family Life**] (April 2009)... Using emergent curriculum begins with learning students' interests. Older students can fill out forms and you can get this information from younger children and their parents verbally.
 * **Let kids handle anything they can safely handle**. Children need to touch things that fill their environment. For example, climbing a tree or walking through a mud puddle should not be something a child wonders about but never gets to experience. Given the opportunity, few children can resist taking something apart to see how it works or mixing various ingredients just to see what might happen.
 * **Show your sense of wonder.** Observe the world aro und you and you'll encourage your children to do the same. Invite a creative response by asking questions such as: "What do you think is inside?" or "Let's see how it works." or "What if you turned it on that side?"
 * **Provide tools to stimulate curiosity.** A tape measure can get a young child wondering how long things are. A magnifying glass, microscope, or telescope can offer a closer look. And, of course, books are primary tools.
 * **Note connections.** Make comparisons. Talk about how things relate and interrelate. For example, "How is a guitar like a violin? How is it different?"

After you know what the students' interests are, then what?

This is where teachers use their imagination. Think about whatever the interest is and think about how that thing or concept fits into the world. For example, one time I was teaching about webbing a concept and I told my students that being very specific worked better than being general. They tested me by asking me to help them web a "peanut butter and jelly sandwich."

If you take apart a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you have: Peanut Butter: peanuts, George Washington Carver, the process of making peanut butter from peanuts, legumes, plants, peanut allergies

Jelly: fruit, making jelly, fruit trees, orchards, perrenial fruits (strawberry plants), vines (grapes)

Bread: yeast, making bread, growing wheat, agriculture, harvest, measuring ingredients, types of grain, flour processing, milling, the history of milling, cultures which mill grain, water-powered mills After you think about everything that is part of the concept, then you can begin to find potential curricular connections. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich is made from agricultural products, which includes various types of science. The type of science chosen for a unit on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches might depend on the benchmarks--which type of science is to be studied in a given year. In this way, it is easy to move from interests to meeting actual benchmarks in an emergent curriculum. It is also easy to teach lessons that meet multiple benchmarks across the curriculum because emergent curriculum is naturally rich in cross-curricular connections.

[|[[http://rec.ohiorc.org/projects/default.aspx|http://rec.ohiorc.org/projects/default.aspx]]] This website presents a number of emergent curriculum projects for pre-schoolers, however, any of these projects could easily be adapted for older students. One project was bicycles. Here are some adaptations that could be used:

Bicycle mechanics--gears and how they work, caliper brakes and how they work, derailleurs and workings, gear ratios (math), what happens as gears get larger and smaller on the front and back end of the bike, frame design and geometry, alloys, wheel design, aerodynamics of bike and rider, relationship between frame design and aerodynamics

Types of bicycles--mountain bikes, road bikes, BMX, racing bikes, stationary bikes, recumbent bikes, tandem, etc. Bicycle history--penny farthing, etc.

Bicycle sports--racing, Tour de France, Lance Armstrong, BMX, mountain biking

Bicycles in Ohio--Tour of the Scioto River Valley, Great Ohio Bike Adventure

Service learning--buy bikes at the thrift store and fix them up for kids who cannot afford them

Bicycles as transportation--bike laws, miles per hour (also in comparison with a car), energy

Bicycles as generators--hook up a generator to a stationary bike and explore energy

Bicycles around the world--they are a major form of transportation in many countries

Bicycle safety and safety equipment

Use the internet to get ideas--look up whatever it is in wikipedia and use a search engine. The world wide web can give you lots of ideas for a project based on the students' interests.

The next step would be to think about these things in relation to how interesting they would be to students as well as how learning about bicycles could address the curriculum.

Math speed of a bike in comparison to other forms of transportation size of gears and gear ratios economics of a bike--how much they cost in comparison with a car calculating the length of a proposed bicycle trip geometry of frame design

Science aerodynamics technology--how various parts work and work together metal alloys and their use in making things energy and energy consumption carbon footprint of bike vs. car or bus

Social studies service learning bicycles around the world people who use bicycles professionally (e.g., police officers) maps of bike routes bicycle events around the world

Literacy reading about bikes writing about experiences with bikes reading instructions for bike repair design BMX course with explanations investigation on various aspects of bicycles

Activities that could be done

Put an old bike in a stand or up side down so the pedals can be turned and explore how the derailleurs work--how the pedals feel when the chain is on various gears and think about when each setting might be useful (e.g., climbing hills). This activity could include counting the teeth on various gears.

Visit a bike shop

Create an investigation (a research genre that incorporates images and text blocks), which could be about how the bike works and/or people who use bicycles

Buy an old bike or two cheap from the thrift store. See if kids can work together to diagnose what needs to be fixed--they can compare it to a working bicycle. The mechanics of a bike are fairly simple and it's possible that kids could get this figured out. Work on repairing the bicycle--even truing the wheels, patching inner tubes, etc. Repaint it and find a place that it could be donated.

Local bike laws and bike safety

**Imaginative Education**
At the basis of literacy teaching is an approach to teaching and learning in general called "Imaginative Education." When you think about it, it makes sense to base literacy teaching on students' abilities to imagine, since the reading process requires imagination for comprehension. After all, if you don't know about cookies, wolves, grandmothers, and paths through the forest, it is difficult to understand the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

Imaginative Education approaches the whole undertaking of teaching and learning from a different perspective than is usual. Instead of dividing learning by topic or stage of cognitive development or Bloom's taxonomy, Imaginative Education splits our ways of thinking into five ways of understanding or perhaps five lenses through which we look at the world.

http://ierg.net/about/whatis.html 

Let's consider how to merge our units on peanut butter and jelly as well as bicycles with Imaginative Education.

Imaginative Education teachers divide how we interact with ideas into five possible frameworks: Somatic, Mythic, Romantic, Philosophic, and Ironic. These are connected with child development to a certain extent--somatic interactions are physical in nature, the way very young children necessarily interact with the world (Piaget's sensori-motor stage). The ironic form of interaction doesn't take place until people are mature enough to be able to handle abstractions and multiple ways of looking at the same thing.

http://ierg.net/about/whatis.html#intro It would be a good idea to look at the Imaginative Education website for details about these things because I'm not going to rewrite them here. I am going to take their frameworks and look at our possible projects. 

The above pdf suggests starting with the emotions behind the ideas--because that will help to give students an emotional connection which is critical.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwich: comfort food great flavor easy to make neat combination of foods to create this one sensory experience memories of making jelly when I was a kid the wonderful smell of peanuts the smell of roasting peanuts in Lexington, KY from the Proctor and Gamble plant the excitement of making bread--the peaceful feeling from kneading dough for awhile and the marvelous process from dough to oven the story of George Washington Carver figuring out how to use peanuts and changing southern agriculture

Bicycles: feel of freedom when riding feeling of accomplishment when I have fixed my bike feeling of accomplishment when I completed the Tour of the Scioto River Valley (210 miles in 2 days) mechanical things are inherently interesting--seeing how things work figuring out what is wrong and then working on fixing it the moving story of Lance Armstrong the vicarious thrill of the Tour de France--people accomplishing something that is extremely difficult the great feeling I have gotten when I have used my bike as real transportation--riding to orchestra rehearsals & concerts (with my long black dress in my backpack)... the positive feeling when thinking about the bike being a green alternative

Next, we consider binary opposites related to these topics--because these things can help us to get at aspects of our study that are interesting to children or can become interesting. Peanut butter and jelly:stale vs. fresh breadGeorge Washington Carver vs. people who thought he could not be a scientist GWC vs. farmers who did not want to change over to peanutsyeast bread vs. bread without yeast (Passover, matzoh, need to be in a hurry)quick vs. slow food--yeast bread is a slow foodgrape vs. strawberryjelly vs. jampeanut butter vs. vegemite (the Australian comfort food that has equivalent status as peanut butter in that culture) homemade vs. storebought

Bikes:fast vs. slowheavy vs. lighthigh quality engineering vs. low quality engineeringLance Armstrong vs. cancer touring vs. BMX, racing vs. mountain biking, etc. up vs. down hilly vs. flat legal vs. illegal safe vs. dangerous working vs. broken large gear vs. small gear wobbly vs. true (wheels) brakes vs. no brakes (track bikes have no brakes) fixed gear vs. multiple gears Shimano derailleur vs. Sturmy Archer Hub Gear old vs. new

Best binaries: PB&J: GWC vs. noncooperative folks homemade vs. storebought

Bikes: working vs. broken Lance Armstrong vs. cancer

Dramatic aspectsPBJ: story of GWC and figuring out an alternative to cotton Image: GWC in lab, GWC addressing farmers Bikes: the movement from broken to fixed, from frustrating to freeing when you fix a bike Image: before and after of a bike that has been repaired

Teaching the content in story form:

I'm not too sure of what I remember about GWC, so I consult wikipedia. It turns out he didn't invent peanut butter--he just popularized it. But that is good enough for me (although at first I wasn't sure I could keep my focus on peanut butter).

The story that might work here would be: "How we got peanut butter" Once upon a time there were a bunch of farmers who planted one crop all the time--cotton. Over time, their farms got poorer and poorer because the cotton kept using up the nutrients in the soil. The people who farmed got less and less money, and they were having a lot of problems. A scientist named George Washington Carver came along and for many reasons wanted to help farmers to plant something beside cotton. But what should they plant? Certain other crops actually put nutrients back in the soil--such as peanuts and other "legumes." But what would a farmer do with a whole bunch of peanuts at the end of a growing season? Would the farmer get in worse shape because he would have nothing to sell, not even a poor crop of cotton? Carver began to figure out what could be done with the peanuts. He discovered that you can take a peanut and light it with a match and it would burn for a long time--because peanuts have a lot of oil in them. He also looked for ways to make peanuts something that people would want to eat. While Kellog of cornflakes fame had patented a process for creating peanut butter, Carver wanted to popularize the food. Peanut butter is a really high quality food in that it contains a lot of protein and it is even used to help keep people from starving. So, Carver convinced farmers to plant the peanuts and he convinced factories to use the peanuts and eventually most Americans grew up on the old favorite: the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Bike story:

Once upon a time there was a college student who loved to ride his bike. He had loved this for many years and had spent a lot of his time as a kid and youth perfecting his riding skills. One semester he began to take a class with a couple of crazy ladies and they discovered that he was very knowledgeable about the style of biking he did and that since biking was such a central point of interest for his life, they could try to help him center his activities in the class around his bike.

Since they were teaching people about teaching the whole elementary curriculum K-3, they figured bike riding could easily fit here. In fact, they assumed that it would fit best under science because of the three laws of Newton and how those figured in the riding of the bike. Nevertheless the student was interest in biking as language and that's where things went.

The student spent time articulating ideas he had been thinking about for a long time and the teachers learned a lot about biking, biking as language, and emergent curriculum. And they all lived happily ever after.

__Emergent curriculum for infants and toddlers__  Emergent curriculum for pre-school