Outdoor education is an invaluable part of the educational experience. For Sycamore School, building social skills, independence, and self-reliance are a few of the positive outcomes achieved when kids get away from their everyday surroundings and are exposed to new and often challenging environments. This includes day trips and outdoor education.
Sycamore students recently visited the Los Angeles Pierce College Roundup newspaper and first- and second-grade teacher Colbey Waggoner said they wanted to show students what a real newsroom is like.
“Our goal is to create our own school newspaper, and we have some stories in the works, so right now we’re just interviewing people and asking lots of questions,” Waggoner said. “So we thought it would be neat to go see how it really looks in the real world.”
Waggoner said the students had questions prepared such as how the student journalists find their stories and what stories college students enjoy the most.
“They said the sports stories are pretty big here, but they also said you just need to go out and make lots of observations and ask good questions,” Waggoner said. “That’s how they find their stories.”
Sycamore School is a project-based school and Waggoner said many of their projects come from what their students find interesting or inspiring.
“Our question for this fall unit is how do we better understand ourselves? By investigating our communities,” Waggoner said. “And so what we’re doing is learning about all the different communities around us and really figuring out who we are as people, how our culture is created and how our identities are built.”
Waggoner said their goal is to have their newspaper printed with a variety of stories they covered at school.
At the Sycamore School, they seek to develop empathetic humans who are skilled in collaboration, critical thinking, and communication — helping students become academically prepared and develop the kinds of skills that will allow them to effectively learn and thrive in the school setting.
