Dr. Anne Morrison’s Educational Psychology classes have been taking field trips to Little Italy and University Circle in Cleveland for the past 20 years to help them create integrated lesson plans as a course assignment.
This semester more than 30 mentors, students, and some of their parents and friends started the trip with Morrison with pizza from Little Italy’s Mama Santa’s Restaurant and then walked to Lake View Cemetery, a nationally-recognized landmark where President James A. Garfield and John D. Rockefeller are buried. The cemetery lends itself to the possibility of many different integrated lesson plans because of its rich history, architecture, sculptures, geology, literature, poetry, and nature on its 285 acres on the edge of metropolitan Cleveland.
The students continued their trip to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, located in University Circle, and were given the opportunity to explore hands-on activities and nature exhibits; receive a demonstration of how to use an inflatable planetarium in their school; and experience the new outdoor wildlife center and woods garden that houses fish, owls, coyotes, porcupines, red foxes, sea otters, and other small animals during the annual Teacher Open House.
Haley Galaska, a sophomore Early Childhood Education major from Chagrin Falls, enjoyed her visit to the museum. “I loved having the opportunity to go somewhere that offers so many different exhibits and learning opportunities. It was one of the first times I was treated as an educator, and I was shown how to incorporate different exhibits and themes into lessons for different age groups. I also was given the chance to learn how to use the teacher resources at the museum,” she said.
Morrison said she provides the two Cleveland sites with the integrated lessons plans created by her students, so that other teachers can use these resources in their own classroom or on field trips.