Pre-Service Teachers Share SMC with Local Schools

The Education Department at Saint Michael’s College is very fortunate to have great relationships with our local school districts. This allows for our pre-service teachers to get hands-on experience prior to joining the job world. Here at the Institute for the Environment, we have tapped into this connection in order to grow our field trip experiences and curricular kits. Most notably were field trips with Champlain Elementary School and Hunt Middle School. 

The trip with CES was organized by Professor Soo Joung Kim and her Content Area Literacy class and they welcomed the fifth grade classes from Champlain to SMC. This experience has occurred

 for multiple years, but this year the preservice teachers worked in conjunction with the Graduate Assistants to design their lessons and integrate the resources offered by the Institute. The fifth graders visit the Farm, the teaching gardens, and the Makerspace. This year the lessons that the preservice teachers taught in each space connected, creating an awesome integrated experience for students during their college visit. For example, one group was learning about compost, so they identified the compost on the Farm, observed the composting in Alliot, and created stickers and a flip book in the Makerspace to promote composting! Other groups dove into building insect hotels and observed the native and nonnative species present on campus.

The field trip with HMS occurred in coordination with Professor Katy Farber’s Teaching Math class and the sixth grade classes at Hunt. The students visited both the Farm and the Natural Area. While in these spaces, the preservice teachers taught math lessons related to their physical environment. They created equations for the students to calculate the number of garlic heads to plant based on the size of the garden beds – a skill they had previously learned while visiting the Farm. When the groups visited the Natural Area, the preservice teachers used the curricular kit resources and got creative with their math lessons! Some went birding, using the Ebird app to make calculations about the presence of different species, while others calculated the grazing results of sheep in the solar field. However, all of the groups made phragmites insect hotels to bring home! Each preservice teacher group created their own equations to teach different skills, such as how many phragmites would fill a can and how many were necessary to fill 100 cans!