Our Place Worth Protecting: How Three Grades Learned to Care for the Hill They Love
Updated: Aug 31
By Alyssa Castellini, 3rd Grade/STEM Teacher, and Jacquelyn Thomason, Pre-K Teacher, Woodstock Elementary School
We teach at opposite ends of the building, one of us with three- and four-year-olds, the other with third graders, but this year our two classes ended up sharing one story. It starts on a hillside on Mount Peg, where our preschoolers hike every Friday for what they call Forest Fridays. Their favorite thing to do up there, without question, is slide down the hill on their backsides.
Turns out that was also the problem. Year after year of small feet sliding and wandering had stripped the soil right off the roots of the trees, and the hillside was starting to erode. We were at risk of losing a space our whole program has loved for eight years.
Jacquelyn: bringing in the high schoolers
I'd already started working with the town to make the trail more accessible for a student who used a walker, and once that work exposed a lot of bare dirt, it became clear we needed to do something bigger. So this year, my preschoolers partnered with students from the CRAFT program at Woodstock Union High School to learn about native plants and how their roots hold soil in place. The high schoolers taught a lesson, then came back for a planting day. Later, they helped the little kids mark a trail within the forest so they'd know where it was safe to walk. Close to 100 native grasses and flowers went into the ground.
What I keep coming back to is a photo of one of the high school students and one of my preschoolers, hand over hand on a shovel, digging together up the hill. Moments like that, and hearing my kids explain, in their own words, why a plant is there and what it's doing, that's when I feel the sense of stewardship really taking root. We'd been talking all year about human impact on the places we love, and by planting day, the kids weren't just repeating that back to us. They understood it.
Alyssa: the story only they could tell
My third graders got a different job. The preschoolers were genuinely proud of being stewards of the forest, but they were three and four, too young to tell that story themselves. So the third graders became the storytellers. First they hiked Mount Peg, taking pictures of what they found interesting and had questions about. Then they interviewed the preschoolers. As they listened, they took notes, some of it just a word or phrase, some of it quick drawings. I took all of those notes, fed them into Claude, and asked it to turn them into a poem that followed the shape of the project we'd been building toward. When I read it back to the class, they lit up, and from there they took over. One kid wanted to build a model of Mount Peg with Lego figures sliding down an exposed hillside, another wanted to draw a poster, and pretty soon we had a whole collection of projects to bring to the VINS student symposium.
At the symposium, my students took turns presenting to kids and parents from other schools, walking people through it almost like a pair of detectives who'd cracked a case. One dramatically showed Lego figures making "the roots of the trees come up," while another explained, "they realized that they were wrecking the plants, so they stopped and fixed it."
What we heard back
What gets us every time is hearing it come back from the preschoolers themselves, in language you wouldn't expect from a four-year-old. Ask one why a new plant is there, and she'll tell you, "its roots make the tree stronger so they don't fall down." Ask what would happen if nobody had cared, and a third grader will tell you the hill would end up looking "like a shredded baby mountain." That's not a line any of us fed them. That's a kid who understands what's at stake.
If you're a teacher thinking about trying something like this: just try it, just do it. Get outside, bring the kids outside, even if it's just a walk in the woods. They'll start asking questions and noticing things you never would have planned for. Let go of the reins a little. Don't overplan. Let the kids decide where it goes. That's when it feels the most authentic, and that's when this becomes the kind of thing kids remember for a long time.
The hillside is coming back now. So is the story, three ages of kids deep, and none of them told it alone.
For more information, contact Alyssa Castellini or Jacquelyn Thomason at Woodstock Elementary School, or the Equitable Climate Action Project at info@uvtpc.com.
