Oct. 21, 2024 --  On a recent field trip to Patterson’s Fruit Farm, Canterbury’s first graders were staring out the windows of their bus, searching for where the sidewalk ends.

Not as part of some mythical Shel Silverstein-inspired scavenger hunt, but because it would help them recognize when they had moved from a suburban community, like Cleveland Heights, to a rural community, like Chesterland where the fruit farm and apple orchard are located.

The students in Pat Dooner and Kate Duhanich’s classrooms had been studying the three different types of communities – urban, suburban and rural – along with roles in those communities as part of their social studies curriculum. They’d read several books and discussed the similarities and differences between the three types, plus focused on community helpers, as part of the IB interdisciplinary unit, “Who We Are.”

The visit to Patterson’s, long a first grade tradition, “is as much about the trip there, as being there,” said Duhanich. 

As Dooner said, “The students can see the exact moment when the sidewalk ends. And then the mailboxes start to grow,” reinforcing what they’d already learned about mail carriers driving their deliveries around in rural communities instead of walking, as they do in our suburban neighborhoods. This highlighted the idea that while the role of mail carrier is the same in both locations, they carry out their job tasks in very different ways.

Even the act of riding a school bus highlights a difference between suburban kids, many of whom can walk to school, and rural kids, who almost all rely on a bus. 

The students were wowed by the space between the houses and, of course, by the sight of horses and cows. They talked about how a farm can be its own little community, where work is dictated by nature and the weather, not by the clock. 

It wasn’t all about differences though. “Students were actually excited to pass by a school,” said Duhanich. “This lays the foundation for thinking about all the ways that we’re the same.”

“For a lot of our kids, their whole world is in Cleveland Heights,” said Dooner. This small trip, funded by the school’s PTA, helped to expand that world. 

An earlier lesson using Google Earth allowed the students to start at Canterbury and expand the map wider and wider, noticing the city to the west, with its shades of grey and brown, and the country to the east, with more and more green covering the screen. “To get to see that in real life is really neat,” said Dooner.