Experiences
Experiential learning is an integral part of elementary education, where play and projects are the norm in curriculum. As students get older, however, more emphasis is put on tests and essays. While these kinds of assessments are necessary, they often take the place of allowing students the chance to immerse themselves in their education. Crafting experiences for students can take a lot of planning, but it can also force students to physically interact with information that they had been learning from a distance. Tasking students with making their own experiences—through multigenre projects, for example—requires that they not just know the content, but can inhabit it, too.
Examples
History can easily be taught through lectures and tests, but that doesn’t mean students will care. I like to use several hands-on lessons throughout the year to show students the skills and behaviors that have either fallen out of use over time (like writing in cuneiform) or those that need to be practiced to become a citizen of the world (like playing the social game Bafa Bafa). Language arts also benefits from these kinds of experiences (like acting out texts), but physically exploring the life of a character through a memory box or recreating an enchanted object from the main plot shows that students do not just read the novel, they experience the novel.
