Chickens give learning a reason
Today our school receives 13 laying hens; a donation from an amazing school nurse, Amy Bell, who sold her ranch to live the life of a city-dweller. The chickens are delivered early Monday morning by Amy’s husband, who trusts the children of Northwest Expedition Academy to nurture and care for their poultry. The office manager Michelle promises the chickens are in good hands as they place the last girl in the pen. Northwest Expedition Academy is now a farm.
One might ask, why does an elementary school need 13 laying hens? The answer is not easy, but makes sense. As an expeditionary school, the students of NExA learn by doing. One might teach math, English or science in isolation and a child will learn to compute numbers with no purpose, or write a story with no focus. These chickens give learning a reason.
Students in the Poultry Production Club at NExA use math to compute the price of food purchased, materials used, egg income and balance profits versus losses. Students also create a marketing plan to sell the eggs, including merchandising, product design, delivery and quality control. Students present their work to health organizations, retail operations, school officials and potential business partners to share their successes and challenges. Lastly, students measure and weigh the food needed each day for the birds, clean the cages, collect the eggs and ensure the bird’s safety and welfare.
The students in this class are passionate about their work. Each child looks forward to coming to school each day to examine their flock and release the hens from the coup, allowing the birds to free-range all day eating bugs and oyster shells, peck the soil and cluck. The work each child does is rewarded by checking the nesting boxes in search of eggs. Each egg is discovered with a giggle and proud declaration of excitement — like finding a brightly colored egg on Easter morning.
In an expeditionary school, learning takes place inside and outside the classroom. The idea is that students come to school with different and limited schema or background information. Our job is to help the child build schema by offering the opportunity to explore the world by doing. A child might have schema of an egg, how an egg tastes, where to buy an egg in a grocery store and that an egg comes from a chicken, but a child might have limited information on how a chicken makes an egg, what breed of chickens lay the most marketable eggs or why an eggshell is hard.
The hope is, by making learning engaging and exciting, a child creates a culture of inquiry. A culture of inquiry creates a thirst for understanding, therefore the child doesn’t just want to learn about a chicken egg, but the learner must know everything he or she can discover about a chicken egg. This thirst for knowledge becomes contagious and all students cooperatively learn together, excited what one might find to add to the pool of knowledge.
Learning by doing, and having an inquiring mind is a lifelong skill which serves a student well in middle school, high school and beyond. As long as a child builds a thirst for knowledge — the overwhelming desire to need to know the answer to a question — the student continues to own his or her education. When these skills are developed young, they tend to continue a lifetime.
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Send comments or other suggestions to William Rutherford at bprutherford@hotmail.com or visit pensiveparenting.com.