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LREI October 2005 News
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| Field trips at LREI: An Ongoing Tradition |
 It’s hard to imagine a time when field trips were not a staple of every child’s educational experience. But when Elisabeth Irwin started taking kids out into the world, it was considered revolutionary. Of the standard curriculum, she wrote that it was too concerned with giving dry information and too little concerned with affording opportunities for experience. Regular field trips became the main organizing principle of the curriculum, always followed by carefully structured and sequenced learning activities - discussions, writing, dramatic performances, block building for the youngest children, reflective thought and research or the older ones. Through all these methods, raw experience framed, shaped and transformed sensory input into authentic understanding. Starting in the Early Childhood classrooms, children begin to explore and “map” their world - the classroom itself, the school building, the neighborhood around school, and ultimately the city itself, traveling down to the waterfront, where they watched longshoremen unloading produce destined for neighborhood stores and tugboats guiding big ships safely to port. Older students travelled further afield. In the 1950’s they visited striking textile workers in Lawrence Massachusetts and descended down into the coalmines of the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania. Today they travel to Europe each Spring. Every teacher at LREI conveys formal concepts of knowledge and the skills of the discipline through first hand sensory experiences – problem solving and hands-on activities in the classroom and field trips out into real world beyond the doors of the school. Elisabeth Irwin would be pleased. Learning from experience remains the organizing principle of an LREI education.
Nicholas O’Han
Director of Education
October 2005
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| Fourth Grade Farm Trip |
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Each year our Fourth Grade classes board a bus, wave goodbye to their adults and head up to the Hawthorne Valley Farm in Columbia County, New York. With the Third Grade farm trip behind them, they approach this trip as experienced farmers, ready for three days of hard work and fun. Over the next days our Fourth Graders will feed the animals, ride horses, pick apples, herd the cows, and enjoy a tractor pull. During their days at the farm they will also strengthen their existing friendships and build new bonds. This time at the farm allows our students to return to school as a stronger classroom community, ready to face the challenges of Fourth Grade.
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| Middle School Trips: Greenkill & Colonial Williamsburg |
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Students and teachers had a wonderful time at the annual Fifth and Sixth Grade trip to the Greenkill Outdoor Environmental Education Center in upstate New York. The trip is always taken early in the year so Fifth Grade students new to the middle school have a chance to bond with their classmates, the faculty that work with their grade, and the savvy Sixth Graders, who are always happy to share their past experiences. For three days and two nights, students played, hiked, sang, and partook in Fifth Grade PE teacher and Athletic Director Larry Kaplan's infamous speed round of “Simon Says.” Greenkill is just one of the grade level trips taken by middle school students at LREI.
In November, the Seventh Grade travels to colonial Williamsburg to learn about the living and working conditions of the early colonists. They then use the information they gather there to create their own Colonial Museum, which they proudly present to parents and classmates in February. In May, the Eigth Grade travels to Washington D.C. to tour selected monuments and museums, including the unforgettable United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This trip ties together all the strands of the Eigth Grade social studies curriculum, from Civil War to Civil Rights.
At LREI, we stress the importance of such field trips so that our students learn about history in living color, and not just from between the pages of a textbook. As Agnes De Lima observed in “The Little Red Schoolhouse, field trips are a means to “tear down the walls of the classroom and bring the adolescent into direct contact with the community." That spirit is still alive and well in the Middle School.
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| Ninth & Tenth Grade Ramapo Trip |
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On September 29th, the Ninth and Tenth Grades set off on their annual trip upstate. This year they returned to Ramapo for two days of bonding and fun. One of the favorite activities was Movie Madness charades, proving that the students are perhaps not quite as adult as they like to claim! But the real highlight was the high ropes course—in addition to excitement, the ropes course offers the students a chance to put their cooperation and communication skills to work—after two days and a night of practicing these skills, they more than rose to the occasion. Ramapo also offers the ideal opportunity for forming friendships. For the Ninth Grade, this is their first real activity as a group, and since the trip some faculty have noted a real difference in the Ninth Grade classes. As for the Tenth Grade, this is their chance to be older and wiser and set a great example, all of which they did wonderfully. Although the only other overnight trip planned for the upper grades is the annual Eleventh Grade college trip, the year has already brought numerous small trips to a variety of locations, from the public library to the American Museum of Financial History.
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