As a second-grade teacher in a self-contained classroom at Edgewood Magnet School in New Haven, I find the neighborhood/ magnet setting a rewarding environment, with students coming to school each day from a variety of home circumstances and with differences in academic levels. As a result of these variables, the children have differing levels of background knowledge and life experiences. The classroom is a mixture of varied ethnicities, economic strata and social and emotional strengths and weaknesses. Edgewood provides an arts-integrated curriculum, an educational approach that supports multiple intelligence theory and uses arts education as a means to assist students to improve their academic performance and enrich their lives. Arts-integration curricula use art forms--music, visual art, theater, and dance to teach other core subjects, including math, science, reading, and language arts. This planned unit aligns with the philosophy of the school. The use of scientific inquiry allows all students at all levels to learn in an inherently differentiated environment, learning new concepts and experiencing laboratory and field demonstrations as they move through this curriculum unit on watershed science and specifically, inland waters in New Haven. My students will research and design projects to submit to the annual Science Fair that show the experiments that helped them learn about the waterways in New Haven. This unit will support the place-based learning that Edgewood Magnet school encourages. Trips to the Edgewood Park to visit the ponds and river for hands-on investigation and experimentation will be modeled on experiences from the seminar.
