Geocaching with teenagers

This week I went on the eighth grade field trip with both teams to present a session on geocaching to the kids. It doesn’t have a whole lot to do with libraries directly, but I am the school’s resident geocaching expert (my self-assigned title) and I jumped on the opportunity to go.

If you don’t know what geocaching is, you should hop over to Geocaching.com to learn more about it. Basically, people hide boxes all over the world and post the coordinates online at the site. Folks (like me) can log-on, download the coordinates, and go on a hunt for the boxes. Boxes range in size from the size of a large pill to the size of a shoebox…and some are even bigger, smaller, or more creative than that. The fun is in going out and discovering new places while walking around/hiking to get some exercise and fresh air. I enjoy the thrill of the hunt and racking up finds online. As a curriculum connection, though, it teaches map skills with math and social studies connections, as well as working some physical education in to the activity.

I taught geocaching in five different 50-minute sessions, and the kids hunted for five different caches hidden around the park. Each cache contained a science question that needed to be answered on their field trip clipboards. Some of the kids didn’t really like the activity, but many of them got really excited about it. Several had previous geocaching experience. I even had chaperones visiting the website from the smart phones and talking about giving it a try. The weather was beautiful and the kids got to run around a bit, so overall I think it was a fabulous and successful event. I also got some great photos of the kids in action. I will leave you with my Animoto video of the best shots:

8th Grade Field Trip: Geocaching!, posted with vodpod

(ugh, and on a side note…Wordpress does not make it easy to embed an Animoto video! My goodness, I had to save the video in vodpod and then find the share link on vodpod to embed via a new wordpress entry, bla bla bla. Wow. Way to make that super-hard. Thumbs down!)

Give me back my assistant!

For many, many years, our school had benefited from full-time access to a media assistant. Because we share a space with another school, the shared media assistant was able to work for both schools. However, times have changed. Each school lost a day of assistant, and the relationship between the two schools has become such that sharing is no longer an option. So we have gone from five days of assistance to two. This puts a major strain on my time and my program for various reasons.

Today I found a slideshare presentation, shared by the fabulous Ms. Joyce Valenza, that sums up the incredibly important job that media assistants do, and why we should keep them in our library. I am trying to get my media assistant for three days next year, and maybe one day we can win the fight to have one all week long!