West Plains, Missouri is home to one of the schools in the Place Network: Glenwood Elementary School. Glenwood Elementary School has supported students on the student committee since 2021, and this is the first dispatch from their team, reported by students Kylee and Marlee, both 8th graders, and supported by faculty advisor Bridget Larsen.
For roughly the last year, the Glenwood middle school has had a vision. Our teachers have first-hand seen examples of magnetizing opportunities other schools have gotten to experience. They proposed the idea of learning from a different perspective to us, and everyone was thrilled and raving in support. Being from a very rural area, we chose to connect with something almost everyone has ties to – chickens.
Why chickens?
We chose to give a fraction of the chicken population the life of royalty by placing their home at our school.
How is it getting done?
Creating whole-group blueprints and visions has taken a great chunk of our project so far. As of right now, we have come up with tasks to be done, decided on supplies needed, divided our students into small groups to make our ideas shine, and we have started the hands-on portion of the project.
Important life lessons are being learned through the middle school student’s eye. We have all collectively thought of and carefully planned the oasis for our chickens. Before we get into the thought of our life source, let’s focus on the outermost level of connections. Teamwork and problem solving are greatly sought after in life. With our project, we have both deeply explored and elevated our teamwork and problem solving skills by working together to discuss and implement problems or new beginnings with our landscape, or ideas for better or more efficient designs, etc. If you were to look up life skills, you would get hundreds of thousands of results. Our chicken coop has brought us to use and work through a countless number of insufficiencies. In a traditional classroom, the average student body would see a handful of those problems every so often. With this learning method, we have come and gone through far more issues in a much thinner timeline.
In all, our team of chicken experts has explored and conquered the idea of life using chickens as a learning tool to uplift our education.