Connecting with and Learning from Our Sky

Written by: Mike Murawski

With the pandemic and the shift to at-home schooling, so many students have lost that physical space of connection and social interaction that school provides. It’s been a challenge to find ways to create a sense of connection and shared experience at this moment when we’re all distant from each other. Through our work with schools and teachers throughout this past year, we’ve been focusing on ways to envision nature and the outdoors as something we can all experience together and share. One current project with fourth graders at the Rio del Sol School in Oxnard, California, has been using the sky to build these connections through observation, learning, reflection, and creative design.

The Rio del Sol School is a STEAM-focused K-8 school that centers inquiry-led, project-based learning. We have been working with teachers and students across several grades at Rio del Sol since last summer when we began a year-long partnership with the Rio School District. During the fall, we began working with one fourth grade class on a more in-depth project exploring the sky.

Almost more than anything in nature, the sky seemed like something we could all connect with and observe, no matter where we are. I was extremely interested in not just learning about the sky (through more science-based learning), but learning from the sky through close looking and an open-ended process of inquiry. What questions would we have after spending more time observing the clouds, the sun, and the stars? In what ways could simply watching the sky--and being open to what it has to teach us--help us make sense of the world and our place within it?

Making a Connection with Our Sky

We began with a simple discussion of what the sky means to us, and what memories we have of watching the sky. Students shared some memorable moments, like being with their family stargazing late at night, watching a particularly colorful sunset, or seeing the smoke from nearby wildfires change the sky from a shimmering blue to a thick layer of grayish-brown. And we also talked about how seldom we actually stop, look up, and watch the sky, either during the day or at night.

Some of my own observations of the winter sun moving across the sky & sketching the night sky from our house.

To frame our project, we thought about how there are many different ways to learn about and from the sky. An approach based in science is just one way we could connect with what we observe above us. This open-ended and creative approach was also inspired by educators Joni Chancer and Gina Rester-Zodrow, whose book Moon Journals: Writing, Art, and Inquiry through Focused Nature Study recounts how their students recorded observations of the moon in creative “Moon journals.”

All of this led us to our Design Challenge for the project: to work together and co-create a Sky Watching Guide that we could share with other classes to help guide their sky observations and journaling. To get started on this ambitious and exciting project, students first spent a couple weeks creating their own visual organizers (see our blog post on creating visual organizers) for their sky observations. Then, students used their visual organizers to record sky observations, which included everything from the changing colors of the sky, different types of clouds, the phases of the Moon, the movement of the sun, and constellations in the night sky.

It was really exciting to see students share their observations and how they created their own pages to record their thoughts, responses, and questions. We all learned from each other as we shared our sky observations, and the students became their own experts. As Chancer and Rester-Zodrow reflect on their students creating Moon journals:

“Presented with the challenge of seeing something new, unique, and compelling…, they become active learners, questioning scientists, patient researchers, expressive artists, and detailed writers.” (xvii)

Stories from the Sky

Before the winter break, we invited students to think about the sky through stories, introducing them to storytelling traditions from Indigenous communities here in North America. We listened to Wilfred Buck, a member of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation and science facilitator at the Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Centre. Buck has gathered star knowledge and stories from Indigenous communities across Manitoba, sharing selected stories via YouTube (learn more from this episode of Science Friday). 

We also watched some of the animated stories developed by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian for their Our Universes exhibition focusing on Indigenous cosmologies. After reflecting on these stories, we invited the students to not only write their own stories from the sky, but also create their own writing prompts that could be included in our Sky Watching Guide.

A Process of Co-Creation

A few weeks ago, we began wrapping up this project by arranging a live design workshop with the fourth grade class through Zoom. Students learned more about illustration and our creative process, and got actively involved in drawing and designing the pages for the final Sky Watching Guide.

This process is a journey in co-creation as we work to bring student designs, ideas, and questions to the forefront of a learning tool that helped these fourth graders connect with their sky--and each other. 

We are so excited to share the final Sky Watching Guide after it’s completed, and expand our connections with others watching the sky and sharing their sky stories.

“The sky is an infinite movie to me. I never get tired of looking at what’s happening up there.” – K. D. Lang