Who We Are
I am an experiential educator, outdoor enthusiast, environmentalist, die-hard Minneapolitan, and mother of two fierce and beautiful young children. My college degree is in ecology and environmental science, so my early career consisted of traveling around the country with various endangered species projects. In time, the true Minnesotan in me was screaming to come back home and settle down. So I became a teacher!
I worked at an experiential community school for nine years. I decided to take a short sabbatical a few years ago to stay home with my own children, which was one of the most difficult decisions of my life. I fell in love with my students, my coworkers and my work. It was hard to put that behind me, even if temporarily. Hence this blog! I couldn't completely walk away, so here we are. My experience is in experiential education including project-based learning, community learning, inquiry, making, place-based learning and more. I was also heavily involved in our school travel program.
The mission of the school was developed around the idea that the "world is the classroom". Every learning activity, project, or lesson that I did with my students for almost a decade were inspired by that quote, and I watched this philosophy do wonders for my students. It didn't mean that I had to literally travel the globe with my students, although our students were very lucky to have had some travel opportunities.
What it does mean is that some of the best learning experiences are those that don't come from a lecture, a worksheet, or a textbook. They come from experience. They come from reaching out beyond the walls of our classrooms, literally and figuratively. We are living in a new age of technology that makes local and global collaboration possible without even leaving our desks. This blog is dedicated to educators that want to provide interesting learning opportunities for students even if all you have available to you is a computer and the internet!
The information and resources talked about in my blog and available in my TpT store, are for those looking for cool activities instead of worksheets, inquiry-based experimentation rather than prescribed recipe labs, problem-solving and solution finding to global issues, and acting on those problems rather than reading about them in textbooks. They are for educators who want to inspire intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation to learn.
I worked at an experiential community school for nine years. I decided to take a short sabbatical a few years ago to stay home with my own children, which was one of the most difficult decisions of my life. I fell in love with my students, my coworkers and my work. It was hard to put that behind me, even if temporarily. Hence this blog! I couldn't completely walk away, so here we are. My experience is in experiential education including project-based learning, community learning, inquiry, making, place-based learning and more. I was also heavily involved in our school travel program.
The mission of the school was developed around the idea that the "world is the classroom". Every learning activity, project, or lesson that I did with my students for almost a decade were inspired by that quote, and I watched this philosophy do wonders for my students. It didn't mean that I had to literally travel the globe with my students, although our students were very lucky to have had some travel opportunities.
What it does mean is that some of the best learning experiences are those that don't come from a lecture, a worksheet, or a textbook. They come from experience. They come from reaching out beyond the walls of our classrooms, literally and figuratively. We are living in a new age of technology that makes local and global collaboration possible without even leaving our desks. This blog is dedicated to educators that want to provide interesting learning opportunities for students even if all you have available to you is a computer and the internet!
The information and resources talked about in my blog and available in my TpT store, are for those looking for cool activities instead of worksheets, inquiry-based experimentation rather than prescribed recipe labs, problem-solving and solution finding to global issues, and acting on those problems rather than reading about them in textbooks. They are for educators who want to inspire intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation to learn.