Conners Emerson School
What happens when you bring a music and a classroom teacher together around a creative idea? In celebration of Acadia National Park’s 100th birthday Rebecca Edmondson, music educator and with MaryAnne Young, classroom teacher from Conners Emerson School in Bar Harbor created a Maine musical for students in grades K-5. Plant Kindness and Gather Love is an original Maine Musical that integrates literacy, history, science and the arts.
Plant Kindness and Gather Love will be performed on May 8, 6:00 p.m. at the Criterion Theatre in Bar Harbor.
Plant Kindness and Gather Love is a resource for educators that teaches about Maine, island life, nature and Acadia National Park. The content is suitable and adaptable for students is grades K-5 and includes 10 songs, stories, a reader’s theater script, student activities, movements/dance, and more.
Plant Kindness and Gather Love will be offered as an interactive 2 day teacher workshop at the Schoodic Institute, Acadia National Park on July 2-3, 2018. Participants will be granted 15 credit hours for the 2-day workshop, which includes other park outdoor activities. Families are welcome too, and may stay on through the 4th of July. There is much more to discover!
Plant Kindness and Gather Love story songs are a celebration of our natural world through an integration of Literacy and the Visual and Performing Arts. The integrated materials will, according to research, create intrinsic motivation, encourage learning for understanding, motivate students, and spark curiosity. Each story, song, and theater script will present facts in a musical manner and will dovetail with classroom literacy, music, science, social studies, history, and familiar surroundings of our young Maine explorers and stewards of the earth. Plant Kindness and Gather Love is a nature themed Maine Musical about island life, Acadia National Park and Maine.
Check out the video that provides information on the history and process of creating Plant Kindness and Gather Love.
Acadia National Park is offering a great professional development experience this summer. The national park is recruiting six classroom teachers to spend time this summer as Acadia Teacher Fellows, learning about the national park’s diverse natural and cultural resources, and ways to protect them. Three teachers will be selected to work on Mount Desert Island, and two teachers will be stationed at the Schoodic Education and Research Center (SERC) in Winter Harbor while one teacher will work at Saint Croix Island International Historic Site in Calais.
For six weeks during the summer, teacher fellows will interact with park visitors on public programs, along carriage roads and on hiking trails. They will attend ranger-led interpretive programs, be given place-based training, participate in citizen science activities, interact with park professionals and researchers, and much more. Teacher fellows will be asked to create a lesson plan related to Acadia’s resources to take back to their classroom and share with other educators.
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