The Edible Schoolyard and A Night in the Global Village

In the Edible Schoolyard, 6th grade students had the opportunity to learn about growing and maintaining a garden. It is a fun and interactive way for students to learn about botany and biology. They spend time outside preparing to grow the food, and in the end they get to eat their accomplishments. The teachers that spoke said that this was an awesome tactic for their students because they were interested in learning how to grow things and forgot that they were actually learning.
I agree, I think tactics that allow students to be hands on with their learning experience is very effective. I know that just going outside during class time instead of sitting in a classroom learning about the same things is way more fun. Students look forward to days like these because it is out of the norm and tend to be more engaged in the lessons.

A Night in the Global Village was my favorite because I would love to have an experience to live in the place of villagers who have close to no resources to survive. The Global Village where the students visited for their assignment is 5 acres of land that has examples of countries like Guatemala, Thailand, and refugee camps. Students were broken up into families and had to survive one night in their camp. Every camp did not have all the resources that they needed so they had to bar gin trade with other camps to get the needed materials. The refugee camp had to be the hardest, because they had no resources at all and had to beg every camp for food and supplies. But the catch is, they did not speak any language of the camp so they had to use non verbal communication. In the end students learned a lot about how it feels to not be as privileged as we are. One student that was part of the refugee camp said that even though he had a hard time getting food, he knew that he would have some tomorrow, but what if his life really was like that? He could not imagine how it felt to live day to day without knowing where his next meal was going to come from.
Now this assignment for students is an amazing one and I wish that I would have done something like this when I was in grade school. This could be helpful to a teacher in her lessons by learning more about different cultures around the world. It can also give students a better appreciation of all the privileges we have for just living in America. Watching the podcasts with my own classroom could be useful because it can give idea on projects we can do on our own and it also allows students to see what other students their age are doing around the world in their learning experiences.