Field Trip

As part of a writing unit we are currently working on we took a walking field-trip to the cemetery down the hill from our school. The collaborative story we are working on is the result of a partnership between our class and a kindergarten class in Japan. As our classes have worked together to develop the setting for our story we have decided that it will start in a cemetery. So in order to build context we decided to take a walk and check out our neighborhood cemetery.

In addition to discussing "setting" we have also started to develop characters. One character we have thought of including in our story is a mischievous monkey. In order to develop this concept we decided to try and find places on our walk where a monkey could live. We were also looking for places that a mischievous monkey could hide in wait ready to ambush the people he was playing tricks on.

Lucky for us we had three parent volunteers to accompany us on our excursion. A big thank you to them for taking time out of their busy schedule to spend time with us! If case you were wondering, our walk was almost exactly 1 kilometer in length. Despite being a bit hot the walk was actually quite nice. Along the way we took photos using our iPods. Our goal is to use these pictures to put together a short movie that will allow our friends to go on the same field-trip only virtually using our images and descriptions. 

We didn't have much time after returning from our field-trip to do much other than to create a short descriptive word list. Here is that word list followed by some photos the students took on the trip:

Big tall tree
Big ocean
Tank
Hiding places
Monkeys
Holes
Steep hills
Water
Grave
Bus
Bird
Chirping
City View
Stinky smells
Smell of the ocean
Hard crumbly dirt
Hot hard cement
Gray sandy cement
Hard steel
Red bricks
Smooth watery feeling
Food cooking
Dirt smell
Stinky fish
Yummy pie
Stinky drinks
Toilet
Leaves
Hard wooden bark

 

Lucky for us a bus was passing just as we were heading back to school so we all hopped in and rode back in the cool comfort of air conditioning.  Stay tuned to see how this story develops in the coming weeks!