Extraordinary Learning Experiences!

A Knowledge Quest is an extraordinary Galloway learning adventure involving students, teachers, and parents, in a week long field experience that far exceeds any learning experience imaginable in a school setting. Knowledge Quests provide high-quality, authentic learning expeditions that supercharges the learning experience through: experiential learning, inquiry, collaboration, interdependency, authentic tasks and experiences, high-level of engagement, and advanced performance in the cognitive and affective learning domains.

2nd & 3rd Graders will go to Camp Allen in Navasota, Texas for 4 days and 3 nights. At Camp Allen, students discover a ‘hands on” educational, once in a life-time experience. Students will enhance their academics through:

Environmental Studies: Forest Ecology & Explorations, Aquatic Biology & Explorations, Astronomy, Botany, Organic Gardening & Farming, Conservation Ecology, Entomology, Herpetology, Ornithology, Mammologist, Archaeology and Water Quality.

Wilderness Education: Outdoor Living Skills, and Orienteering.

Social Studies: Native American Studies, and The Texas Living History Experience. They will also have fun with

Night Activities: Campfire, Night and Sensory Hikes, Astronomy, and Cities (Adaptation & Survival Game) and Group Development: Challenge Course, Initiatives, Canoeing, Games, Orienteering, and Outdoor Living Skills

4th Grade – Texas History Adventure, San Antonio-Austin The 4th Grade Students will visit historic sites throughout San Antonio and Austin. We will visit the Alamo and tour Washington-on-the-Brazos as well as visit our Texas State Capital. The students will get to learn about Life on the Farm to running a Senate meeting.

In the tradition of Galloway, 5th Grade curriculum humanities focus is on American History and how it impacts the global community. Through common threads, the Williamsburg, Virginia trip begins with a tour at the Yorktown Victory Center. At the Nautilus Maritime Museum, students learn about ecology, climate, and nautical history. They participate in a scavenger hunt for the Battleship tour of the USS Wisconsin. The experience is hands on learning about colonial crafts, art and music. Students tour Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, and view first hand historic reenactments of the Colonial militia. The tour continues to the Jamestown Settlement and the Shirley Plantation. Culminating activities back at school include: photo scrapbooks, journals, reflective poetry writing, and creating stories about their Williamsburg Wanderings.

This new program for Galloway’s Intermediate students offers the opportunity to participate in a monthly off campus Learning Experience. Each outing is tied to the curriculum the teachers are working on at that moment. These include excursions such as (but are not limited to):

• Port of Houston Boat Tour to discuss Commerce, Energy Science, and the history of the Port of Houston.
• OceanStar Drilling Rig Museum in Galveston to learn about fossil fuels and energy resources. They also learned about the different types of off shore drilling rigs and how they are designed, engineered, and built. The students also tested their own engineering skills by building a derrick out of marshmallows and pasta noodles.
• The Houston Ballet performance of The Nutcracker where they learned social etiquette in attending a formal setting and were able to utilize reading concepts and skills such as summarizing, visualization, analyzing, and drawing conclusions. They experienced deliverance of a story with no words through the beauty of dance and music.
• A VIP tour of NASA and the Johnson Space Center, given to the students by current astronauts in training for space flight, while learning about Space Exploration. They saw the Mission Control Center, toured the International Space Station simulators, and got to go to the Neutral Buoyancy Lab to see the astronauts in action.
• The Main Street Theater’s performance of Jackie & Me… A play talking about social issues during the times of Jackie Robinson in Black History Month. They saw the use of literary devices such as: idioms, non-fiction genre style, sensory and figurative languages, and being able to make connections to compare and contrast two stories with same topics in order to see the author’s perspective and purpose.
• Texas A&M Boat excursions and Shark Dissection to study ecology and marine life in a real time setting
• Houston Health Museum to go along with the study of the characteristics of cells and classification of living things.
• HERStory Quilt Traveling Museum was a great opportunity for the students to see women in history and add to their research for the Museum Day Projects.