Children roamed the docks, fish markets, ethnic neighborhoods, and construction sites of the city and made maps of them. Usually this will take them up the Hudson by boat or train. Or they may be tracing their water back to its source in the Catskills. T he expansion beyond the local environment is achieved by tracing one of the pieces of the web of interconnections that ties city dwellers to the ecology of the surrounding countryside. A t the Greenfield Center School in Greenfield, Massachusetts, the curriculum expands outward in a similar incremental fashion.
Kindergartners make block models of their classroom.
After field trips to the furnace room, the office, and all the classrooms, first graders model the whole school. In second grade, students look at how the school is heated. They locate and map where the oil is stored, who delivers it, how the heated air gets to the classroom, where the oil company's storage tanks are, and how the oil gets from the oil company to the school. By third grade the students study the city of Greenfield and in fourth grade they are taking canoe trips and making models of the Connecticut River valley in north-central Massachusetts. This is our challenge.