Flippin for Valley View Scavenger Hunt

Grade Level: K-12

Subject Areas: Math, Science, "Parental Involvement", Reading, Writing, History, etc.

Essential Question: How does the world around us really look?

Materials: video cameras, digital cameras, parent volunteers, video editing software, paper, pencil, clipboard, resources from Valley View, blank DVDs for later use.

Prepare: letters to parents, scavenger hunt papers, cameras, and follow-up with other teachers for editing assistance, and a resource guide for parents if naturalists are not available.

Objective: To cover a variety of science and language arts state standards due to the lack of time in the classroom.


Procedures:

Now with Flips we can bring the experience to the kids and make it real. At Pattison we are blessed with a gorgeous nature preserve called ValleyView. http://www.valleyviewcampus.org/ There are trails that we can walk on that take us through the woods, around gardens, a pond, barns, meadows, the river, etc. Words do not give this place justice. You can do this anywhere outside your school though.

On Earth Day the first grade takes a walk with numerous parents and friends. This is an entire afternoon adventure. The kids have a scavenger hunt page that they are working on throughout their entire walk. We have Valley View naturalists also set up at different stations throughout the preserve to point things out to kids and share things they have found.

Almost all of the items are from the state standards to help the kids recognize nature, and see it's true value. For instance, they will look for non-living and living items, animal habitats, animal markings or tracks, limited resource, unlimited resource, something smaller than them or bigger than them, something the color white, an animal, a flower, a change in the environment caused by the weather/animals/humans, they even look for things that start with all the letters of their first name. This provides challenges as well.

Children/Parents are given a resource guide of some of the things to look out for while on their walk. The children fill out their form - but with Flips the kids can record their findings and bring them back to class. We can put together a movie of all the items they found for each step of the scavenger hunt. We have many students at our school who have life threatening allergies, and therefore we cannot bring any of the items back into the classroom for their safety. Having Flips would give those children a chance they may never have any where else. The kids would record each one stating the item before recording.

Then take the recordings and involve 6th grade to help in editing them and putting them together as a scavenger hunt video in our computer lab. The students will not only be able to share their findings but actually show us what they found. Parents are given a vocab list and a map from Valley View to explore all they can while outside. The children will have to decide what they would like to put on the video for each group as we will only have an hour of recording time. The walk is over an hour and there are 5 kid to a group. This is always a great time for parents to bring what they know to the classroom as well. Parents get involved, and we can make a class video to put on DVD for the kids to keep as not only an educational film but a momento of their first grade year. Then they can write about their Flippin' experience and write a class book called We Flipped for Valley View or in others cases We Flipped over Nature