Exit Slip: October 7

 Today's class in the garden was a lot of fun! It was great weather to be outside.

My personal favourite part was the sit-and-stop in the same place as before, as I was able to observe the pear tree and how the environment has changed in the past two weeks. I've included my thoughts and observations. I was reflecting on my experience afterwards with Mike, and realized that I hadn't registered any sounds while I was sitting. This happens to me often when I'm deep in thought, where I can block out sounds very easily. Both a blessing and a curse, and maybe a sense that I need to be paying more attention to.

The other activity of today was a compass and straight edge activity with leaves. Jenny and I looked at two leaves with very different levels of complication at a surface glance. With the more simplistic rounded leaf, we thought it would be really easy as we could just do two circles and have them intersect in the shape of the leaf. However, when we were starting to work on this more, we realized it was going to be way more complicated to do this, and what we could do instead was break it down in a bunch of smaller circles. You can see the multiple layers of circles in the images below. 

For the other leaf, we started with the general idea of the triangular shape, and then got more detailed as time allowed. Next, we tried to use circle bisection to approximate the tip of the leaf, and connected these bisections to approximate the structure of the main vein. We also used fractals to extend the use of triangles and straight edges for the details of the leaf. We realized that the smaller triangles could be broken down into even smaller triangles, etc, all extending to the main stem of the leaf.

I reflected on outdoor learning after class and am encouraged to do more outdoor learning with my future classes as a method of incorporated First Peoples' Principles of Learning. I think that outdoor learning can be used as a tool to embody your learning and to interact with nature. I think that a lot of teachers mentally check this off as a decolonization practice, but the real anti-racist practice is to explain the 'why' to your students. Instead of just having a fun class outside, I hope that my students will leave with a true sense of why it is important to connect with nature and what that can teach us.