Golden Apple teacher Nicci Falcone drew on her experience as a Catholic school parent to work in ‘the best profession there is’
Before the second graders at Holy Cross School in Garrett Park, Maryland, start their summer break each year, they take an international trip – in their classroom.
Their teacher, Nicci Falcone, devised the in-school trip with student passports to visit cities like Paris and Rome, so her second graders can draw on the skills they learned during the school year. Before lunch, groups of students rotate between art, social studies, language and engineering centers.
Last year, during the Jubilee Year in the Catholic Church, her students “visited” Rome.
In another school year, her students’ trip to Paris included doing pastel drawings in Claude Monet’s garden for the art exercise, doing a scavenger hunt to find laminated pictures of that city’s landmarks with information to read on the back of each one for the social studies exercise, building LEGO Eiffel towers for the engineering exercise, and learning some basic French words for the language exercise.