Lesson Briefs | Correlations | Citizen Science Update
The school programs at Tremont are curriculum-based, featuring our award-winning lesson manual, Connecting People & Nature: A Teacher's Guide. We also incorporate a wide variety of citizen science activities that involve students in real scientific research in the national park.
Background on Connecting People & Nature (below) describes the history and goals of our lesson manual.
Lesson Briefs contains brief descriptions of each lesson and downloadable versions of some lessons.
Correlations provides a matrix of correlations between Tremont lessons and Tennessee and North Carolina state standards.
Citizen Science Update for Teachers highlights seasonal research projects that can be incorporated into school programs.
Connecting People & Nature: Using This Guide
"We hope that this guide will provide you with good usable ideas which will help further the goals of environmental education. The lessons in this guide were carefully written, field tested, reviewed and revised by the teacher/naturalists on our staff over a period of fifteen years. We have treated this guide as a living document which has been and will continue to be revised to reflect current practices and the changing needs of education. This volume includes some major revisions and a good bit of polishing of our 1993 revision.
Teachers, National Park Service staff, and other professionals have been involved in the review of these lessons, and their input has been important in assuring that the material is factual, effective, and appropriate for meeting the curriculum objectives and needs of students. The lessons are written specifically for use at Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, but many of the activities, and often entire lessons, can be easily adapted for use in other places and situations.
These lessons incorporate an interdisciplinary, experiential approach designed to encourage the development of a student’s awareness and appreciation of the natural world and people’s relationship to and role as a part of that world. A further discussion of our teaching philosophy, core themes, and design of the “Tremont experience” is found on the pages following this introduction.
The lessons in this guide are actually a series of shorter activities which have been blended together under a specific subject area. We have made a special effort to format the activities within each lesson so that they are separated by an activity headline bar and easily identified by the hand lens symbol. This should enable people to pull activities from specific lessons and utilize them within their specific setting. The approximate time needed for each activity is listed. Worksheets and other printed material needed for activities are found at the end of each lesson and are marked with the scissors symbol.
The lesson manual is packed full of much more than a week’s-worth of activities. School teachers who bring groups to Tremont can use activities other than the ones being taught during their stay as pre- and post-visit activities. Even within the three-hour time blocks, teachers often find more than they can fully cover in that time period. We encourage teachers to plan ways to use any remaining activities at other times during their stay or for follow-up back at school.
The activities within this guide were adapted from a variety of sources. The bibliography in the back of the guide serves as a reference list for good environmental education materials and includes many of the sources from which the activities within our lessons came. We do not claim that this manual represents our original ideas, but rather have tried to draw from excellent environmental education resources and adapt them to our specific lessons and objectives. We encourage you to modify what you find here to your own situation and needs.
It is our joy to be able to share the beauty and magnificence of the Smokies with those whom we touch. Our desire is that such joy and the ideals represented in these lessons be spread to every corner of the globe in an effort to connect people and nature in a way that encourages greater appreciation, respect, and care."
-Ken Voorhis, Director
To get your copy of this guide please see our store page.
