The Sky’s the Limit

The creativity of some public school teachers, particularly in the elementary grades, never ceases to amaze me. I have just finished reading an article in, of all places, “Weather Watch” by Robert Krier. In the article, he relates how a fifth grade teacher began her school year by closing the blinds to her classroom and asking the class to describe what the sky looked like that day. Most of her pupils would end up by writing that the sky was either blue or gray.

The teacher would then take them outside, have them look up, and write what they saw. This activity became a daily ritual. Soon, her pupils were writing entire paragraphs about the cloud effects and the changing colors, and the drama of huge rain clouds forming before a rain.

This teacher used the sky as the theme for everything she taught that year--spelling, social science, science, art, literature, mathematics, history. The pupils learned to make predictions by predicting the weather; they learned graphing skills by graphing the temperature changes; they made a sundial large enough for the kids to stand and measure their shadows at different times of the day. In their study of the sky, the pupils incorporated elements of math, science, and astronomy.

For their fifth-grade state projects, the teacher had the pupils forecasting the weather. For art appreciation, she had them discuss how famous artists had depicted the sky in their works. She had them listen to and discuss how composers had treated sky themes. She had them read passages in literature showing how great writers had depicted the sky.

While engaged in all of these activities , the pupils were learning about their environment and the importance of protecting it. They were learning how to use their imagination and about the beauty of nature and how all of nature is interconnected. They learned how to make observations and to organize and express their thoughts, both orally and in written form.

Of course, in using this approach to learning, we trust that the teacher was aware that her pupils might not be fully prepared for the test-score-based curriculum demanded by the “No Child Left Behind” program backed by the Bush administration. Better go back to the classroom with its emphasis on the reading and the math, the textbooks, the workbook pages, the memorization, and the preparation for the tests.