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Structure of the lesson plans
Structure of the lesson plans
Our overall goal is to create a progression of lessons with activities that build orienteering skills in a way that engages participants, builds their sense of confidence with map navigation, and develops abilities that apply to other areas of their lives. Ideally, they develop a fondness for orienteering.
We are documenting the curriculum by writing a one-pager and a full description for each activity. These are linked from a page for each activity on our public google site, along with videos and example material. We then put together general progressions of lessons that refer to those activities. Each lesson is focused on one or a few orienteering skills.
Our main goal is to provide progressions for educators to get started, and to teach basic orienteering in school. Once they are familiar with teaching material, they can use other resources, such as the Teaching Orienteering book, or the World of O o-training.net site, to create additional activities.
Educators have advised us over the years:
Make an easy-to-read one-page summary
Provide more detail in a longer document.
Include a script for delivering the lesson.
Include the learning outcomes that teachers are already held to, such as the Massachusetts Dept of Education's 2023 Comprehensive Health and Physical Education Framework and the SHAPE America standards.
Pictures are good. Video is great.
Early on we separated descriptions of Activities, Lessons, and Units
An Activity is a single activity, such as Animal Orienteering
A Lesson is what you would do in a class period, and may have several activities and additional components such as warm-ups, "do nows", and assessments
A Unit or Curriculum is a sequence of Lessons
In addition, we have explanatory material relevant across these items.
One challenge has been maintaining a generic set of lesson plans as well as lesson plans tailored for individual client schools and organizations. The specific curricula can be very useful to teachers - but the generic ones are also useful. At the high school level, we have the Lincoln-Sudbury curriculum as an example, as well as the CRLS PE curriculum. We will publish the specific example curricula as well as a generalized progression.
Addtional ideas:
(from Kieran and Evalin) have a one-pager that could be made poster-size for each activity, heavy on the pictures. This could be posted on the gym wall during the unit, and used in class for teaching. It should be as easy to understand as possible, including for English language learners.
We recently decided to create a series of units:
Level 1: aimed at K-2. Emphasis on exploring, finding, naming spaces, games about communicating location (hide and find)
Level 2: aimed at K-5, or those who have done Level 2. Start with Animal-O and lead up to orienteering on a real map
Level 3: map games
It would be great if each level had a series of skills that kids proved they had learned. Like successfully completing Animal-O, etc. And some form of reward like a badge or sticker or little orienteering flag with a picture of one of the animals on it.
In 2020 or so, we started to document specific measurable skills and relating that to the OUSA Patch system and the BSA merit patch. Many of the orienteering skills from OUSA and BSA are more relevant for woods orienteering with a compass, and less for our school sprint orienteering.
2024 notes
2024 notes
Current locations for lesson plans
Current locations for lesson plans
We initially started capturing the lesson plans in Salesforce, where we had a nice database format for Activities and Lessons. We have also documented lesson plans in google docs, on the google site, and in gitbook. Here we list the various lesson plans:
Locations of lesson plans in google drive
Resources / Materials / Lesson Plans: this has a bunch of stuff, including scouts, lesson plans from other organizations, educational standards, At Home Orienteering, a one-pager for middle school orienteering (from spring 2024).
Programs / 2022 / 2022 01-06 CPS / Lesson Plans has what I believe are the main CPSD 3rd grade long form and one-page lesson plans
Z Cambridge PE: Orienteering / Lesson Plans has high school and elementary school plans. The elementary school plans include the online curriculum we did during the pandemic.
Z Lexington Orienteering / Lesson Plans has copies of the lesson plans
Lesson plans in google drive
Elementary progression
In Programs drive
In Z Cambridge PE drive
In Z Lexington Orienteering: "Introduction to Orienteering: In-Person Lesson Plans" (Last edited 2021, Mary Jo Childs). has Lily Pads, timing cards, Animal-O, Geometric-O, isometric map, isometric courses
High school
In Z Lexington Orienteering drive
CRLS PE lesson plans - currently at Version 5.
5 lessons: Short orienteering courses; Vampire/Tag Score-O; Capture the Flag; Poison Score-O; Long orienteering courses. Some information is unique to CRLS
Gitbook: this was recently going to be the main way that we published our lesson plans. The Animal-O activity is a good example of the format we were aiming for. Notice that we separated Activities from lessons in Progressions. We probably would want to add more information in the Progressions section about tailoring activities to a particular age or level. The same activity could be used at different levels. The Level 2 Clue Sheets lesson is a good example of how we were formatting the lesson.
Lesson plans google site: this is publicly viewable. It includes links to:
Afterschool classes: 15 lessons for children in grades K-5 - from 2019
Elementary school PE: we have links to Versions 1 and 2 of the 3rd grade PE, plus the gitbook version
High school
the Lincoln-Sudbury outdoor wellness curriculum. We could add the CRLS PE unit.
We suggest a 4-step approach: (1) traditional orienteering with leaderboard; (2) map symbols via poison score-O; (3) map orientation with maze and grid-O; (4) relays to pull it all together
Ideas for orienteering clubs
Navigation Games - a page with a list of differnet games
School teams
Example games
Google Classroom: it probably makes sense to create classes in GC for educators on various topics, including our curriculum.
Additional - archival or specific - locations for lesson plans
Additional - archival or specific - locations for lesson plans
Notes
Notes
Starting here, this page is on the older side
As of September 2021, we have lesson plans scattered in various places, and are working toward publishing a cohesive set of curricula.
As of June 2024, this is still true. Here is a list of best current inks to describe activities:
Cambridge-specific
Generic elementary
Current goals - 2021
Current goals - 2021
For each of the following formats, publish our lesson plans. This may be in generic form, or specific to a client or program. Publishing means putting online, ideally with linked videos, materials (eg printable clue sheets) and also potentially publishing as a book via Amazon. Listed roughly in order of urgency:
Needham - elementary curriculum based on Spring 2021 Sunita-Williams - to be used for Oct 20th professional development with all elementary school PE teachers in Needham.
Cambridge Public Schools - 3rd grade curriculum for 2021.
Generic elementary school curriculum
Adult educator workshop(s) based on AMC and AEE workshops we have delivered
Teen team-building outing to woods with advance preparation and stations
Teen team or club (after school) - similar to the WIOL coaching manual
15 lessons for afterschool program
Pod progression we are trying with Cambridgeport kids
Forest games
PE for remote learners based on 2020-21 Cambridge lesson plans
Revise and republish At Home Orienteering
Our current challenge is to have each lesson be a nicely formatted one-page sheet.
Sometimes we organize in 3 levels: units - lessons - activities. A unit has several lessons. A lesson has one or more activities. For the 15-lesson curriculum, we separated the "book" into lessons and activities.
Note: The google site allows adding images (png, jpg) and might work well to post the one-page summaries! Something made in canva and posted here might be the nicest looking solution. Canva is quite manual in terms of adding text to things but it is free and allows for nice composition.
Technology platform for curriculum development
Technology platform for curriculum development
We have tried a number of platforms for our curriculum.
Program planning documents: For each specific program, we may have created a planning document that states what we plan to do, including goals, audience, timing, location, maps, and the sequence of activities with times. Look in the Programs team drive for examples.
Salesforce activities database. This was nice bc we could format quite tightly the way we wanted but the database system requires an administrator and then publishing these requires some knowledge.
Wix (our website) - this is awkward to edit and not a good solution for us. Instead, link to another platform
Google site. This includes the 15-lesson afterschool lessons, a version of the 2019-20 3rd grade PE curriculum, the Lincoln-Sudbury high school curriculum, introductory activities for middle and high school, ideas for orienteering clubs, forest games, school teams, and example games. It also has information about copyright. Wow. this is quite nice and comprehensive.
Team drive: 2021 (current) lesson plans, Needham lesson plans; Cambridge lesson plans for 2020-21
Gitbook. We liked the format of this but have abandoned it for now, partly in order to create more specific formats (like the one-page format) and make it easier for non-gitbook-savvy folks to edit the content. However, we still have useful materials there, specifically:
Gitbook revisited 2023
Gitbook revisited 2023
We are considering gitbook again because of the version control, ease of publishing, and data storage in markdown making it possible to programmatically do things like check for completeness, pull from the content to create a custom curriculum for a client, and so on.
Summary: after poking around, I still feel GitBook is a good solution.
Some comments on gitbooks features and limitations:
Connects to github (or gitlab); bidirectional sync
Question: how easy to pull and format a hardcopy book? Possibly with bookdown?
Question: top alternatives?
There is a CLI but it is in alpha. We'd probably program to the content in the repo using R and Google Apps Script (to generate formatted content like the one-pagers)
A GitBook space is like a book. It has pages and page groups visible in a table of contents. Collections are groups of spaces. You can publish variants (like versions or different languages) of spaces (books) within a collection.
Issues: moving pages around won't redirect to the new URL. Would be good to design the organization up front. Need to address this in our how-to docs.
Info
assets/images stored under .gitbook/assets
Beyond standard Markdown: task list with checkmarks, hints (Info, Warning, Danger, Success), clickable tabs,
There is PDF export, but I'm not sure how well it works. It's possible to export an entire space (book) as PDF.
There are integrations that might be useful. Not sure how these would interact with github and the basic markdown. Intercome allows chatting right on the documentation. Arcade has interactive demos.
Reviews with interesting points. (Do we want to restrict access via some sort of subscription to our content?)
Why move from gitbook to Readme (March 2022): Gitbook was slow in loading, both for authoring and for users. (Note: I've found it pretty fast at least on the user end.) Design was simplistic. Readme had better Analytics. Readme has place where you can recommend improvements to the documentation.
Retype might be better in some respects - is it faster? Cleaner in the interaction with github? Can host it on GitHub pages (docs). What about just using GitHub pages instead? Why Retype? Answer: to have markdown. No wait: GitHub Pages is a service that turns Markdown files into a website and hosts the for free on the internet. Hm.
"While gitbook does wrap the branching/merging process in a UI that is digestible by non-developers, Retype is far more powerful because you actually use GitHub (or GitLab). You have the full power of GitHub, including branching, pull-requests, issues, reviews, automation, authentication, and everything else." (source)
Hyperbook.
GitHub Pages. Can use Jekyll to generate static site from Markdown and HTML files. Jekyll not officially supported for Windows. Limits: 1Gb for source repo. Published site < 1 Gb. 100Gb/month; 10 builds pe rhour.
Lesson plan documents
Lesson plan documents
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