Neighborhood Walks

As any new school year begins, teacher brains begin turning and grappling with the many important goals that can quickly feel overwhelming. How can we simultaneously build trust and care within our student and school community while also teaching about academic content that often feels like it just can’t wait?

A neighborhood walk is an excellent way to launch a class’ year together. On a neighborhood walk, a class takes a short walk around the school’s surrounding area, serving to develop relationships between students and the neighborhood as well as touching upon early year content, which can be integrated into your walk.

Get to know your neighborhood history: Before taking your neighborhood walk, it can be helpful to research the history of your area. Whether you live in an urban, suburban or rural community, knowing the history of your area can provide you with information that can be integrated into your classroom learning before and after your walk. Maybe your area has a long history of agriculture that has supported your town for generations. Or maybe your school block used to be the location of the first paved road in your area. Understanding the history of your area can offer ways to integrate academic content into your neighborhood walk and can build a connection between students and the area.

Get to know your current neighborhood: As important as it is to learn about your neighborhood’s history, its equally as necessary to familiarize yourself with the current state of living near your building. What cultures do your families represent? What stores are available nearby (and which are not)? What types of green spaces or commons are located in your area? What types of services are available and most commonly found in your area? It’s integral to get to know your neighborhood if you want to get to know your students.

A new home: For many students, the neighborhood surrounding your school may not be the neighborhood in which they live. Taking a neighborhood walk at the start of any school year helps students new to the area develop a sense of safety, comfort and home. For those who are driven in cars, ride buses, or take trains for long trips to attend school each day, there may be a disconnect between their home lives and school lives. Without knowledge of local shops, parks and streets, many students may struggle to deeply connect with their school as a second home.

Taking a neighborhood walk encourages these students to familiarize themselves with your area and fosters trust and comfort in their physical space. With students spending more and more time in the school building due to extended family work schedules and duties, it’s important that your students feel safe and happy in their school neighborhood.

Building Class Community: Taking a neighborhood walk with your class can build relationships between students, as they find similarities in their interests and play with one another in unstructured ways. While walking, students may share about places they’ve been, meals they’ve had, holidays they celebrate, traditions they cherish, and values that they hold. By taking a neighborhood walk, we encourage students to open up, sharing about their lives outside the classroom as they investigate their surroundings with new peers.

Integrating Content Standards: Taking a neighborhood walk can be done at any time, and multiple times, throughout any school year. Although we often take a neighborhood walk to our local park each September, we also take neighborhood walks to begin each long-term study of our year (around October, January and April). During these walks, students are instructed to search their local area for hints of our study topic. From cars, birds and trains to bakeries, turtles and food, I’ve witnessed students making connections to our classroom studies on blocks that they’ve walked hundreds of times. And this is no coincidence. In my last post, I wrote about the importance of choosing a study topic that can be easily accessed in your local neighborhood. Remember, if students are seeing it everyday, they’re going to wonder and learn about it took.

Three years ago, I was leading a third grade class in a study on culture and immigration using food as a study topic and thread. As we began our study, we walked our local neighborhood to look for signs of the intersection of culture and food. In our area, this is no challenge. More difficult, though, was finding explicit signs of immigration for students to notice and wonder about when taking our first walk around the area for this study. At this point, student hadn’t learned about waves of immigration, why immigrants came to the United States, or about the immigrant communities in our local area. As we walked the neighborhood, almost as perfect as we could have planned it, two of my students noticed a sign in the window of a local brownstone, a sign that we would see over and over again on our walk. The sign read “Refugees and Immigrants Are Welcome Here”. We wondered why these signs were appearing so frequently in our area, and connected it to the recent election and statements and political decisions that had been made regarding immigrants at that time. As we continued walking, we passed a local grocery store that I frequently visited in the mornings. We met with the owners and asked them about their own immigration story, which included information about their family’s move to the United States to avoid war in a region of conflict. By taking our neighborhood walk, our students connected our classroom study to the real world right outside their door by identifying symbols of the topic as well as putting faces and stories to our content by meeting a local community member.

The ‘icing on the cake’ of this story, was an email I received later that week.

“Hi Katie. S saw this sign in a window on our way home. She asked me to take a picture and send it to you. She said it is a good sign to discuss with the class.”

Sometimes a neighborhood walk can create friendships between students, connecting them to one another and to the area in which they live or learn. Other times, your local neighborhood can serve as a real-life spark of interest and social and political engagement by identifying the prevalence and importance of our work inside the classroom in the environment in which your students live everyday.