A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: Using Fieldwork to Bring Project Based Learning to Life in Kindergarten
Each year, the kindergarten classrooms at our small independent school in Boston, Massachusetts engage in a 3-4 month study of community. In this unit, students explore who is in a community, why communities matter, and how individuals, organizations, and other local spaces contribute to building healthy, safe, and strong communities. Students document their learning through drawing, writing, and the construction of model community places, which are then shared with students’ families at a learning showcase. In my first couple of years leading this project, I struggled to facilitate the unit in a way that felt cohesive, hands on, and meaningful to my students, often lamenting what felt more like a series of isolated, one-off activities. Now, this is the unit that I look forward to most each year, and the unit that former students refer back to months and even years later. What changed? We began grounding our unit in fieldwork.
Prior to adopting fieldwork as a school-wide approach, our classes organized and attended more traditional field trip experiences: one-off trips, typically facilitated by site hosts, in which students participated in a series of pre-planned, set activities. Field trips were often planned months in advance, and while activities generally aligned with grade level standards, they often connected only loosely (if at all) with what students were currently learning.
Fieldwork, by contrast, is usually planned by classroom teachers, either independently or in partnership with site hosts, and is designed to help students answer specific questions that emerge through project learning or units of study. Visits may be brief (30 to 45 minutes) and exploring the fieldwork site is the main draw. Activities, if any, are often quite simple: students may draw realistic pictures of what they see, interview people who work there, or participate in authentic tasks that mirror those of workers or attendees at a site (helping to plant seeds at a community garden, shelving canned goods at a food pantry, or attending the unveiling of a piece of public art). Some fieldwork experiences may stay the same year after year, while others emerge based on student interests and/or current events.
Fieldwork is a core component of project based learning at our school, and usually consists of weekly 1-2 hour visits to locations across the city. When planning fieldwork experiences for our kindergarten students, my co-educators and I frequently refer back to a set of best practices put forth by EL Education, including:
The fieldwork immerses students in the investigation and thus builds curiosity and background knowledge about the content of an investigation.
By going to a particular fieldwork site, students acquire a sense of place that furnishes context for the investigation and brings the “story” of the investigation to life.
The fieldwork experience provides a more engaging way to learn content that could be learned in the classroom.
In our Community unit, fieldwork enabled our students to visit and experience a number of local small businesses and organizations committed to strengthening our city through the lens of food justice. Visits included:
Meeting with the founder and owner of a local kid-friendly cafe, who spoke to us about the power of “eating the rainbow” and guided students in selecting fruits and vegetables to build (and blend!) their own smoothies
Meeting with the founder of a local independent grocery store, who shared how his community advocated for access to affordable, fresh fruits and vegetables, then came together to build their own market when larger grocery chains refused to “take a chance” on the neighborhood.
Touring a local nonprofit that cooks and delivers healthy meals tailored to the dietary needs of local residents experiencing chronic or acute illness. Students decorated brown paper bags used to carry meal packages, donned hair nets as they toured the commercial kitchen space, and even climbed through a delivery van!
Visiting Nubian Markets in Roxbury, MA
In the days following fieldwork outings, students wrote and illustrated teaching books about the locations they visited, created portraits of the leaders they met, and built replicas of spaces out of cardboard, construction paper, and clay. During these activities, students regularly referred back to photos we’d taken during visits, facts we’d learned while researching places prior to visits, and quotes from our interviews with local leaders. Over time, students became experts on each of these places and spoke compellingly about ways each of these local landmarks contributed to a stronger, healthier community. Their work culminated in a community showcase, in which students recreated each of the locations we visited and took on the rolls of workers, inviting families and students in other grades to shop at the grocery store, order smoothies from the cafe, and decorate bags for food delivery packages. We invited the leaders we met to attend as guests of honor, celebrating them at the showcase for the work they are doing to make our community strong.
Visiting a mural by famed local artist, Robb “ProBlak” Gibbs
Fieldwork has been key to bringing our community unit to life, and continues to be one of our school’s greatest assets in implementing meaningful, hands-on project based units. Fieldwork expands and deepens student learning, whether we are studying community, water bodies, Ancient Nubia, or animal migration. But the impact on children’s learning goes beyond our units of study. As students conduct fieldwork week after week, year after year, they become familiar with our local transit system, saying good morning to fellow passengers as they step onto the subway and thank you to the driver as they exit city buses. They build skills for interviewing local leaders, and wave hello to small business owners when they return to local shops with their families. They tell their grandparents about the neighborhood community market where residents can purchase halal meat, notice murals on city walls painted by local artists, and tell stories about the time they made cards and decorated bags for local residents receiving food deliveries. Students see themselves as active participants in their community, and see their local community as a landscape for rich, relevant learning.
So what are some of the lessons we’ve learned since we began incorporating fieldwork into our project work?
Keep it simple. Our school is fortunate to have access to various modes of public transportation just outside our front door. But, some of our favorite fieldwork experiences have involved simple walks around the neighborhood with a clear task for students. To launch our Community unit, we walk a few blocks outside our school, asking students to notice the people, places, and things that make up our community. In a later unit on water, much of our fieldwork takes place in our play yard, exploring how water freezes and melts as the seasons change, digging trenches in the dirt to see how rain water flows, and pouring water across various ground surfaces to explore absorption and runoff.
Pick up the phone. When trying to arrange fieldwork visits, it’s certainly helpful to have a connection- a parent member who works at a local lumber yard, a grandparent who volunteers at a local hospital; we’ve had wonderful luck when asking members of our school community to help us plan and come up with potential fieldwork ideas. But, you might be surprised how many visits started with a cold phone call: “Hi, I’m a kindergarten teacher and have been reading about the wonderful work you are doing. I’d love for our students to meet you and visit your shop.” Many local leaders and professionals are happy to share about their work. Just be sure to give them a bit of advanced notice and some guidance on what you’re looking for. Then be sure to call, email, or bring them a note afterwards to appreciate their time and partnership. A printed photo that students write their names around can be a quick and easy thank you gift.
Build relationships over time. A great local connection is worth its weight in gold. If you have a visit that goes especially well, be sure to keep the relationship going! You might invite a local leader to visit students as they work toward their final product or to attend a learning showcase. If students have follow up questions, email your connection and ask for their thoughts. And of course, see if you can visit again next year!
Resist pre-packaged field trips. Though it can be tempting to say “yes” to places that run their own field trip activities, we’ve found that these activities often feel disconnected from the project work students are doing, and often disconnected from the place itself. Though it is more work to facilitate a visit yourself or to make connections with a local organization, the up front work nearly always pays off. And facilitation doesn’t have to be fancy. Something as simple as walking to a local playground with a tote bag of clipboards can yield wonderful results, whether students are looking for signs of accessibility, taking photos of surrounding trees to classify later, or testing out kite designs.
Prepare Young Learners for Success. As with everything we do with young learners, preparation and modeling is key. Especially early on in your fieldwork journey, spend lots of time preparing your students for what will happen during your visit and practicing procedures for fieldwork travel. Model and rehearse how you will enter and exit buildings, how you will walk together to field work sites, how to greet and thank bus drivers and site hosts, etc. Teacher-made social stories with photos of the subway station turnstile, the sidewalk you will walk along, the fieldwork site where students will sit and draw what they observe, etc. can be especially helpful when preparing young students for early fieldwork visits. Similarly, be sure to prepare your site hosts, especially if they are new to working with young children. Explain what students have already studied, what questions they hope to answer through their visit, and what kind of activities or talking points would be most helpful for your site hosts to prepare. And be explicit about timing: I usually ask hosts to talk for no more than 5 minutes and to keep tours to 10 minutes or less. These guidelines not only make visits more enjoyable and developmentally appropriate for young students, they also lighten the lift for hosts, making it easier for them to host again and again.
Lauren Chamberlain teaches kindergarten at The Croft School in Jamaica Plain, MA, an independent school for students in preschool through sixth grade that emphasizes project-based learning and hands-on, relevant experiences that prepare students for a lifetime of learning and community engagement. Prior to teaching at The Croft, Lauren taught kindergarten, first grade, and behavior intervention in schools in Phoenix, Arizona, and worked in Boston-based education nonprofits with an emphasis on Social Emotional Learning, youth-driven changemaking, and connecting classrooms with local professionals to support students in building content expertise.