A reason that poor children are sometimes unprepared for school is that the words they are starting to read in books may not convey meaning to them. What does it mean to park a car if you have never ridden in a car?
The NY Times has a lovely article about one NYC school’s unusual field trips, designed to fill some gaps in knowledge that textbook writers take for granted.
Michael Winerip writes, “Experiences that are routine in middle-class homes are not for P.S. 142 children. When Dao Krings, a second-grade teacher, asked her students recently how many had never been inside a car, several, including Tyler Rodriguez, raised their hands. ‘I’ve been inside a bus,’ Tyler said. ‘Does that count?’
“When a new shipment of books arrives, Rhonda Levy, the principal, frets. Reading with comprehension assumes a shared prior knowledge, and cars are not the only gap at P.S. 142. Many of the children have never been to a zoo or to New Jersey. Some think the emergency room of New York Downtown Hospital is the doctor’s office. …
“Working with Renée Dinnerstein, an early childhood specialist, [Ms. Levy] has made real life experiences the center of academic lessons, in hopes of improving reading and math skills by broadening children’s frames of reference.
“The goal is to make learning more fun for younger children. … While many schools have removed stations for play from kindergarten, Ms. Levy has added them in first and second grades. [And] several times a month they take what are known as field trips to the sidewalk. In early February the second graders went around the block to study Muni-Meters and parking signs. They learned new vocabulary words, like ‘parking,’ ‘violations’ and ‘bureau.’ JenLee Zhong calculated that if Ms. Krings put 50 cents in the Muni-Meter and could park for 10 minutes, for 40 minutes she would have to put in $2. They discovered that a sign that says ‘No Standing Any Time’ is not intended for kids like them on the sidewalk.” Read more.
One thinks of all the small daily interactions one has with one’s own children and the learning occurring without forethought. There are interactions and learning in poor families, too, but if the words and concepts are not what they kids will encounter in school, I think these excursions can be very helpful.
Photograph: Librado Romero, NY Times
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
Great article to highlight. I didn’t read the whole NYT article, but I am assuming they mentioned how pervasive a problem this is with standardized testing.
This reminds me of when I was on a schoolbus full of my 6th graders from Lowell headed to the beach on a science field trip. As the bus crested the back of the dunes into the parking lot, the open ocean came into view. The waves crashing on the shore were audible, but what flooded my senses most at that moment were the gasps and shrieks of 13 year olds kids that until just then, had never seen the ocean.
The things we take for granted …
Yes. And I think the future is in good hands when teachers like you understand these things.
I teach a class of mostly disadvantaged kids, all behind in their learning. Not all of them are second language learners, but all of them have language issues, and what you write here is so very on-target. There are so many things foreign to them, simply because they haven’t had the opportunities to experience them. I find half of my work to be exposing learners to new ideas and thoughts. It is so easy to do, and so rewarding. My students voluntarily chose to stay in at recess today to watch little home videos I had taken of my own kids over the past year. Included in my videos were a trip to the Grand Canyon, a local 4th of July Parade, a picnic at a campground, and building a sandcastle at a beach. Each of these videos left my students open-mouthed. They simply couldn’t believe what they were seeing, and they wanted to keep watching more.
It is important that we work hard to catch these students, and students like them, up to their peers. I’m not convinced that the best way to do this is by testing and “book learning,” though the books sure are important. They really need those real-life experiences that get them ready to open their minds to all that books (and other learning) have to offer them.
How great to have your personal experience! Thank you. And how great that there are educators who use their common sense and try things like this!
Thank you!
Appreciate this message very much.
I loved the faces on the children who were visiting a garage in the photo.
Nice entry point into a world that is foreign to them, flippets. It is so motivating to have that real-life (and personal–since you are their teacher) connection when they are reading stories or studying geology, history/civil rights and ecology. Otherwise, very little has meaning to them if there isn’t that frame of reference. Keep up that great teaching practice.
Thanks for commenting on the comment by flippets. I thought she sounded like a teacher anyone would like to have. Like you!
Both your post and the comments are eye opening. I’m used to hearing truisms such as “Some children in cities don’t realize that milk comes from cows,” but these real-life examples (no experience of riding in a car, or seeing the ocean, or building a sand castle) reinforces how worlds-apart people’s experiences can be.
I remember when I was in fourth grade, our class went on an overnight camping trip. We were to stay in cabins. I had never been camping, and I couldn’t imagine what “cabins” were like, so I drew on the only experience I had–namely, sleeping in a sleeping bag in my friend’s furnished basement at a sleepover. I imagined that the cabin would probably, therefore, have wood paneling, wall-to-wall carpeting, and decorative nets and buoys on the walls. Of course I was wrong, but I simply had no way of imagining what camping cabins would be like!
It’s good if school books can reflect some of the children’s previous experiences, too, but I think it doesn’t hurt to expand their experiences. Books have at least moved way beyond the tow-headed Dick, Jane, Baby Sally and Spot of my childhood. “Oh, Oh, Oh! See Spot run!”