The following is adapted from Literacy Moves Outdoors by Valerie Bang-Jensen.
Trails motivate us to see what’s just up ahead, or around the corner. Even in literature, from the trail of crumbs that Hansel and Gretel create, to the classic yellow brick road and Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, trails hint at adventure and reward us with new sensory experiences, surprises, and a chance to explore our surroundings as we go. A trail may invite you to go in a new direction, although even traveling a familiar path or a loop means that you may come back to the start a little bit changed. Literacy can play a role in putting our senses to work outdoors, to observe our surroundings, complete challenges, and experience the enjoyment of being outside. There are many ways to create a literacy trail, from spontaneous chalking, to a concerted school community-wide initiative to create permanent walking trails.
Pick an approach that helps your students meet your literacy goals from the suggestions in the table below:
Try this: Trails of Application and Practice
Think about two types of literacy trails you might create with your students. One might be to practice new skills, such as reading chalked or painted directions for a sensory movement break outside, retelling events of a story, or playing hopscotch with word patterns.
Make Paths with Chalk: Design a trail for the application or practice of new ideas or skills. Find a surface that can be drawn on. Choose or sketch out an existing path or design one that is linear, serpentine, or a loop. With your bucket of chalk and blacktop area or path, invite your students to apply and practice some of their literacy learning. How many words can they write using the patterns ill, ape, and ack? Use a path to show the “journey” a character takes in a recent book. These approaches work in other subjects, too; you might ask students to outline and sketch the water cycle, or make a timeline of events from a history unit.
Or try this: Trails of Connection and Exploration
With your students, create trails that help the school community explore natural settings. Planning for the trail can involve numerous literacy skills you would be working on inside—why not apply them outside, too? Drafting, writing for an audience, summarizing, and using symbols and nonfiction conventions can play a big role trail-making.
Building on the other approaches to moving literacy outdoors, you could include a story walk, and wayfaring and interpretive signage to help orient visitors and share information about the school or area. Developing a school trail can be an authentic way to create curriculum relating to visual text such as symbols, maps, photographs, and interpretive signage to share new knowledge. You might start with one of these ideas already created by schools across the country:
Themed walks: One school in Iowa created an animal track trail with signage explaining what visitors might see in the snow. This would work for local birds, too, in all seasons. A fourth grade studied the history of a local flood and set up an interpretive trail with water level markers, dates, and interpretive signage to describe the events. Another school made a trail with occasional exhibits describing local alumni the students had interviewed.
Here is a sampler of trails you might create with your class:
A read-aloud is a great way to introduce trails, and here are some suggestions to get you started:
- The Hike (Alison Farrell)
- Tiny, Perfect Things (M.H. Clark)
- Wonder Walkers (Micha Archer)
