In the first five months of this school year the Outdoor Education students have had a common goal, transfering a rugged, difficult to pass-through temperate rainforest into groomed trail within a canopy of green. For our SET-BC project the main body of work that our students have completed is the trail itself. The Lexw Qwo:m trail has been open for a month now and has seen lots of use. While most of the trail is completed there are still many small finishing touches are being added for scenic appeal.
The students have worked hard on designing and building an artifact that needs to be hiked in order to fully grasp its true beauty, and to gain a greater appreciation of Chilliwack’s geography. This month the class was honoured by the Chilliwack progress when the local newspaper wrote an article about the classes hard work, “Clearing a path to outdoor learning in a Chilliwack forest,” https://www.theprogress.com/news/clearing-a-path-to-outdoor-learning-in-a-chilliwack-forest/ . In the online article there was a video, where towards the end one of our students had the opportunity to share about his time on the trail. I believe that this artifact of student work will have the greatest impact on the students, as they had an opportunity to shine brightly, and publicly dispel some of the myths surrounding ‘alternate’ education students. Other artifacts that we are working on are creating video’s that will be hosted on Youtube. Our culminating project is to create a short documentary highlighting the physical aspects required to build the trail, but also the social/emotional learning and gains received from our work. Students are in groups and are currently planning how they will convey their journey throughout the project. In the meantime I have posted a few time lapse videos showing some of the hard labour the students have been completing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJF15gvgr-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOv7YzaEM5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myhH2ay4A2Y&t=4s
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This month has been a busy month in the media, but a slower month on the trails. Towards the end of December the Chilliwack Progress asked to write a story on the class and its work on the Lewx Qwo:m trail, https://www.theprogress.com/news/clearing-a-path-to-outdoor-learning-in-a-chilliwack-forest/ . It was a fantastic way to finish off the year of 2018. Students got to feel like celebrities as the newspaper had its photographer come to the trail and capture the students hard work. Multiple students also talked to the journalist about the impacts that the trail work has had on them. In January the class focus was on avalanche training for our snowshoeing trips. We’ve taken a well timed hiatus from the trails which allowed us to avoid the torrential rain fall Chilliwack has been bombarded with! Students have been preparing for our next time out, February 12th, as we will be joined by a grade 4/5 Outdoor themed class.
For myself, I’ve been busy trying to figure out how to best manage all the videos the class has captured on our Go-Pros. To date we have over 75 gigabytes of footage, and the struggle is finding a way to ensure all students have quick access for creating their documentaries. Working with the district tech department we have some hopeful solutions to the data crunch and our slow wifi download speeds! |
AuthorsThe Education Centre's Outdoor Education Class!!! Archives
May 2019
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