Schools

Broadening Horizons at Bloomfield Hills' Bowers School Farm

Annual visits provide young learners a glimpse at farm life that translates into curriculum.


It's a typical chilly, but sun-filled fall afternoon at the Charles L. Bowers School Farm in Bloomfield Township, and Latte has a captive audience. 

Her head half-buried and plowing through a trough of corn feed, the full-size adult goat seems oblivious to the more than dozen strangely quiet, yet obviously curious first graders gathered in the barn looking on. Even as they take turns, one-by-one, pinching and milking her engorged udders. 

"A couple times a day, as farmers, we have to milk her so that her udders don't get too uncomfortable," the tour guide told the students from Birmingham's Bingham Farms Elementary School.

It's all part of an annual visit the Birmingham Public Schools makes to broaden student experiences, officials said. More than 50 students toured the grounds, ride a wagon to the pumpkin patch to select their own pumpkin, and got up close and personal with Latte. Though it does provide great visuals and reference points for units on the lifecycle and the seasons, the visit's real benefit comes through the students' writings, said 

Part of their curriculum includes a unit called 'small moments,' where students give a personal narrative about a new experience or recount something they've learned.

"It's amazing how you can get young writers to love writing by letting them choose what they like to write about," Sadler-Haase said. "It starts a little fire under them."


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