Green School of Baltimore - Educational Philosophy

Educational Philosophy

Environment as an Integrating Context Curricular Approach
Literacy
Integration of Projects and Literacy
Math
Science
Social Studies
Arts and Culture

The Green School of Baltimore
Curriculum Overview

Unlike many schools where learning is isolated and students move from one unrelated subject to the next every 30-45 minutes, the Green School will connect students’ learning across different subject areas and provide numerous hands-on experiences. Students in each grade at the Green School will be engaged in a year-long study organized around an essential question, which both incorporates the Maryland State standards for that grade level and culminates in an action project in the environment in or around the school. Projects will include, for example: designing and creating rain gardens; developing and maintaining a recycling program; creating a tree nursery; planning and growing an edible, organic garden. Students’ classroom instruction in reading, writing, math, social studies, science, and the arts will connect as much as possible to their grade’s study. For example, as second graders work towards creating rain gardens, they may improve their reading skills as they learn how to read scale diagrams, seed catalogs, climate maps, and gardening how-to books; in math they may practice addition and subtraction with regrouping as they calculate prices for plants to purchase while staying within a budget, and they may reinforce measurement skills as they map their garden sites.

Grade	Big Question	Areas of Study	Environmental Project	Arts & Culture Connection
K	What impact do we have on the environment of our home and schoolyard?	Trees Butterflies Birds	Bird boxes Butterfly gardens	Creativity Arts are in everyone’s life
1	What impact do we have on the environment of our neighborhood?	Pollinators	Bee boxes Pollinator gardens	Arts Education Art as work/profession
2	What impact do we have on the environment of our local watershed (The Jones Falls)?	Water runoff Forest & stream buffers	Tree nursery Water quality testing Rain barrels	Cultural Institutions Local cultural resources
3	What impact do we have on the environment of our city and the Chesapeake Bay?	Chesapeake Bay ecosystem	Growing bay grasses Schoolwide recycling	Baltimore Arts & Culture Great art comes from here
4	What impact do we have on the environment of our state?	Oysters and their connection to Maryland history	Growing oyster spat to plant in the Bay	Maryland Folkways Folklife (cuisine, folk art, music, occupations)
5	What impact do we have on the environment of our nation?	Gardening Composting	School-wide composting Edible, organic garden	Media Literacy Media images are produced in/by a system

CURRICULAR APPROACH

Our Environmental Approach:
Students at the Green School of Baltimore will learn not only from textbooks and at desks but also from real-life experiences and problem-solving opportunities. This type of instruction follows an educational approach called “using the Environment as an Integrating Context (EIC) for learning.” EIC is not limited to learning about the environment or developing environmental awareness. Instead, it is about using the school’s surroundings and community as the context for the work students do. EIC employs natural and socio-cultural environments as the context for learning while taking into account the “best practices” of successful educators. It combines these approaches in a way that:

Breaks down traditional boundaries between disciplines
Provides hands-on learning experiences through problem-solving and project-based activities
Adapts to individual students and their unique skills and abilities
Develops knowledge, understanding, and appreciation for the environment – community and natural settings
Provides students with the opportunity to connect and integrate what they are learning to their surroundings.

The project-based learning approach at The Green School will provide students with the opportunity to apply the skills and concepts they have learned in the classroom to problems in the real world. These experiences will engage students in the role of discoverer and problem-solver, and will help them develop communication skills, leadership skills and environmental stewardship. For more information about EIC, please visit http://www.seer.org.

Balanced Literacy:
Balanced Literacy, the workshop approach to reading and writing, focuses on meaningful applications of reading and writing. In this model, teachers demonstrate strategies of proficient readers and writers, then guide students and provide lengthy opportunities for students to practice these strategies individually at their independent level. This model of literacy instruction is being used successfully in many school systems throughout the U.S.

For more information about Balanced Literacy, please visit the Primary Literacy Framework site.

Integrating literacy instruction with environmental projects:
The Green School’s pedagogical approach, which integrates project-based learning and balanced literacy, allows these two powerful instructional components to support each other and provide a meaningful context for the reading and writing students do. Teachers use the reading students need to do in the course of a project to teach both reading strategies and content. For example, during the Literacy Block students learn to read informational text, such as how to predict the main idea from a page’s heading or how to interpret information in charts, maps and graphs; then during the Investigation portion of the day, they apply these reading skills to informational text as they read to learn important concepts related to their project, such as how salinity affects growth of bay grasses. The writing students do is equally grounded in their year-long projects and includes writing grant proposals, invitations, instructional manuals, and books for their younger peers. This integration provides numerous opportunities for teachers to connect the work of the year-long projects to meaningful reading and writing.

Math:
The Green School will use Investigations in Number, Data, and Space® in teaching mathematics. This complete K – 5 program, developed by TERC to correlate to the NCTM Standards, focuses on the major strands of mathematics: number, geometry and measurement, data analysis, and the mathematics of change. The investigations in the curriculum have been designed to engage students in key mathematical contexts as they develop number sense, learn to visualize and describe geometric relationships, and collect and analyze real data. Students will work together to explore mathematical problems in depths, use a variety of materials and technology, and express their mathematical thinking through talking, drawing, and writing. For more information, please visit the Investigations in Number, Data, and Space site.

Science:
The Green School will teach many of the skills, processes, and concepts necessary for science literacy through the year-long projects for each grade level (See Attachment: Science Connections for an explanation of how the projects at each grade level address standards from the VSC). Through these projects, students will learn and apply fundamental science skills including: 1) observing (using the senses to get information); 2) communicating (talking, drawing, acting, writing); 3) comparing (pairing, on-to-one correspondence); 4) organizing (grouping, seriating, sequencing); 5) relating (cause and effect, classification, correlating); 6) inferring (classification, if/the reasoning, developing scientific laws); and 7) applying (developing strategic plans, inventing). We do not expect that all science content will be taught through the grade level projects. To supplement the science content taught through the projects, we plan to use portions of the FOSS (Full Options Science System) developed with a grant from the National Science Foundation by Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California – Berkeley.

Social Studies:
The Green School has designed the essential questions for each grade level to match the gradually expanding areas of focus in traditional Social Studies curricula, starting with the family & school in kindergarten, and moving outward to neighborhood, city, state, and nation.

The Arts and Culture:
The Green School’s curriculum in Arts and Culture will give students the opportunity to develop both their own creativity and their confidence and capabilities to participate in fully the arts and culture. Students will gain an understanding of the cultural ecology by studying expression and creativity in everyday life, the working lives of professional artists, the organization of cultural institutions, the art and cultural history of Baltimore, Maryland folkways, and about media images as products of media industries. The curriculum is being developed with reference to the National Standards for Arts Education, which require that students gain interrelated knowledge of arts practice, art history, and art criticism.