Photo: Abby Fox
Eldredge Elementary School teacher Renée Hadfield is partnering with fellow teacher Kara Ratigan on a grant from the East Greenwich Education Foundation to teach on the theme of Past, Present and Future.

BY ABBY FOX

Studying the “Past, Present and Future” as a year-long theme may seem like a huge topic for fourth-graders to handle, but their teachers at Eldredge Elementary School say they’re up to the challenge.
Kara Ratigan and Renée Hadfield received a $2,369.98 grant from the East Greenwich Education Foundation to incorporate interviewing elders at Greenwich Bay Manor; learning about Native Americans at George B. Parker Woodland Wildlife Refuge in Coventry; and studying every region of the country’s way of producing energy, all in one school year.
“It puts everything together,” Ratigan said, whereas in past years, they’ve been able to do one or more of these projects, but not all of them at once. “Without the funding, there’s no way we could have paid for all of it.”
In fourth grade, the students are required to study state history and “land and water” in the sciences and Ratigan and Hadfield now have exciting ways to bring those topics to the children: through one-on-one interviews with older people, on what life was like for them when they were fourth-graders, and later, by making what’s called a “spiral book” that reveals what they’ve learned in their social studies and science curriculum, through writing and art work. “It makes the curriculum meaningful for the kids,” Ratigan said.
Then toward the end of the year, students will pair up with the younger generation, second-graders at Frenchtown Elementary School, “to teach them what we’ve learned,” they said, and to read aloud the children’s books they’ve written.
This is the second-year the two have team-taught together. “We bounce things off one another,” Hadfield said. “And then we build from that,” Ratigan said.