Environmental Education Curriculum to Accompany K-2 Field Trips to Airlie Gardens and the Benefits of Environment-Based Education at the Elementary Level

abstract:

This project combines a literature review of research on environment-based education with collaborative work with Airlie Gardens and New Hanover County teachers to create meaningful lesson plans to complement field trips to Airlie Gardens, a local county park. Despite its convenient location and abundance of learning opportunities, Airlie Gardens still remains largely untouched by New Hanover County Schools. At the onset of this project, Airlie Gardens offered field trips for 3^rd and 8^th graders along with an accompanying resource binder containing pre-visit, on-site, and post-visit lesson plans. Although any grade level was welcome, there were no lesson plans to go along with the field trips. There were two purposes of this project. The first was to create an accompanying curriculum that meets North Carolina Standard Course of Study objectives for Kindergarten, First, and Second Grade class field trips to Airlie, as well as a list of correlated children’s books. The second goal of this project was to research the benefits of environmental and environment-based education at the elementary level and in doing so, illustrate the value of Airlie Gardens as an educational tool. This paper examines how interaction with the environment aids in development and learning, while also provides opportunities for cross-curricular integration and content-area literacy.