At Gillen Brewer, we seek to connect our students with learning experiences in their community. The Art Farm in the City, a small petting zoo, is located just a block away and has been a wonderful resource for our students over the years. The school has an ongoing relationship with the Art Farm and with Gabby, the Art Farm's lead outreach professional. Over time, the school and the farm have worked together to identify specific types of activities that help our students access the content of the farm's outreach curriculum. We have also shared special education best practices to make sure that the programming is a good fit.
For instance, research shows that concrete, hands-on experiences are beneficial for our students, so Gabby incorporates more of these types of activities into her work here. During a recent visit about birds, Gabby used a gross-motor approach by giving the students real feathers and giving them the chance to pretend to fly like a bird. After the feathers activity, the students got to handle a real parrot, dove and chicken. While many of our students are proficient readers, real animals often grab their interest more effectively than texts. Finally, Gabby used a read aloud book to include a literacy angle and to keep the pace of the 30-minute session moving sufficiently along. In general, a variety of activities helps to make the lesson accessible for a neurodiverse group of learners. Over the course of our many field trips, community walks, trips to Asphalt Green and the park, and other community experiences, we have worked in similar capacities with museum educators, librarians, physical education instructors and others. Although the Art Farm does work with other special education programs, the majority of their programming serves typical students. Experiences with community members in more typical settings can present challenges and anxieties for our community, but we understand that our students benefit greatly from those experiences. Thus, we seek to act as translators, connectors and advocates as we help our students explore the world around them.
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ProjectsBraque posts photos and resources here to accompany many science units and explorations. Archives
November 2017
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