Guanpu Elementary School, East District, Hsinchu City – Spring Outing Themed Course for Fourth Graders: A Train Adventure
(I) Explanation of Teaching Philosophy
1. What learning experiences do children in urban primary schools lack? What life skills do they lack? What is the real school environment like for children? What are some thematic activities that children find interesting, engaging, and intriguing to explore during their school life?
2. In addition to connecting with real-life situations, life skills courses must be taught through a variety of learning activities (such as experiencing, exploring, trying, solving problems, and group cooperation) to gradually cultivate core competencies in life skills courses. Through children's self-organized campus picnic-themed courses, children can gradually build their perception experience of the campus natural environment and enrich their aesthetic experience of life.
3. We expect children to create more connections with the real world, allowing them to encounter and converse with themselves, others, knowledge, and nature. The school is not just a place for learning knowledge. Through outdoor immersive courses, students can gain more life experiences, making learning ubiquitous and enriching the diverse aspects of children's school life.
(II) Curriculum Orientation
Closer to Real-World Environments: Guanpu Elementary School is a typical urban elementary school, where students live in a man-made concrete environment surrounded by high-rise buildings. Weekend activities mostly involve shopping malls or indoor activities, with few opportunities to go outdoors and connect with nature. Therefore, encouraging children to explore the natural ecology within the school grounds allows them to create unique interactive experiences with their environment. This fosters not only natural knowledge and self-learning skills but also an appreciation for the beauty and fun in everyday life.
Problem-based learning: Through a spring outing-themed curriculum, children experience, explore, try, and act in a real school setting, gaining enjoyment, encountering problems, communicating and helping each other, and solving problems. First, we let students use their senses to open up their physical senses. Then, we let them treasure hunt in nature, stepping out of the classroom to explore various natural elements in the environment, enhancing their understanding of the environment. Afterwards, we take students into the school grounds to experience spring, searching for the spring breeze and the moon over Guanpu, perceiving the diverse aspects of the environment through interaction. Finally, through a picnic activity themed "A Date with Spring," they think about how to interact with the environment. Learners create their own interactive experiences with the external environment – "A Natural Feast of Spring" – and also create interactive relationships with other people and things – "Preparation of equipment, group agreements, and setting up the scene," etc.
Student-centered approach: We let children learn in real-life situations and through independent tasks, gradually developing their literacy skills. The teaching prioritizes the learner's problem-solving awareness to guide the learning process, laying out the context and continuously asking children "many" and "good" questions. We give children tasks and time to find methods and discover "many" and "good" answers, because literacy skills are not taught but are gradually accumulated, deepened, and cultivated. This teaching design is also the path of exploration for educators in "literacy-oriented teaching".
