"What do you really love about this book? What are the big ideas?"
In collaboration with The Learning Alliance, I was working with a second grade teaching team at Beachland Elementary School in Vero Beach, Florida. They had planned a unit around fossils and they wanted help with designing a final project. At the table were three teachers from Beachland as well as museum staff from the Vero Beach Museum of Art. The museum had recently received support from Quail Valley Charities to build deeper partnerships with the schools by working directly with teachers on curriculum design as well as bringing students to the museum.
The teachers explained they were focusing on rock, soil, and how fossils were formed. They noted the specific standard they needed to address—the Florida Earth and Space standard that asks students to "Describe how small pieces of rock and dead plant and animal parts can be the basis of soil and explain the process by which soil is formed." We then looked at the essential question they had developed:
How does being inquisitive lead to great discoveries?
We loved the words "inquire" and "discover" in their essential question, so we knew the final project had to in some way involve actually discovery. They explained they were focusing their unit on two texts.
Both stories are biographies of Mary Anning who collected fossils with her family and sold these "curios" to the wealthy who visited the seaside resort area where she lived. She made many extraordinary discoveries including the first ichthyosaur skeleton. This idea of "found curiosities" reminded me of a teacher institute we hosted five years ago at Habla called "A Cabinet of Wonders." We based the institute on the idea on the wunderkammer—also known as a "cabinet of wonder," a room, closet, or cabinets where individual collectors during the Renaissance assembled remarkable objects from around the world.
"Musei Wormiani Historia", the frontispiece from the Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities. Source: Wikipedia.
We realized that these cabinets of wonder were the original source of today's museums and suddenly all the pieces of the unit elegantly fit together. Students will comb the beaches of Vero Beach looking for "curios." In a similar way that rocks and fossils tell the story of our earth, the students will ask questions and make inferences based on their objects: What are the stories they tell? Similarly in the museum students will look for "curios," objects that interest them from the collection. They will also learn from museum curators how museums are shaped—how do curators make decisions around what to include and what to leave out?
Finally, with the help of museum education staff, student will work to build their own "Cabinet of Wonders,"—the objects the students curate tell the story of the community where they live. The students' cabinets of wonder will be exhibited in the museum.
This is when curriculum planning is most exhilarating—when we mine the texts in search of underlying themes and ideas. We are indeed looking for the curios that might lie just beneath the surface.
This opportunity for teachers work collaboratively together was a result of the unique partnership between The Learning Alliance, an organization dedicated to literacy across the community, the Indian River County School District. and the Vero Museum of Art.