Preparing for an Amazing Journey!

Four years ago, our school, the Mission Hill School in Boston, MA, made a wonderful, student-centered curriculum decision. Since a large percentage of our student population has family/ancestry from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, we decided to change one of our school-wide themes to the Taino.
 
Who are the Taino? This is the exact question many of us asked. We soon learned that this amazing group of Native Americans were the first to meet European explorers in the Caribbean and had a thriving civilization hundreds of years before their arrival. We also learned quickly that there were very few adult resources about the Taino and even less for children!

With little time to research and prepare, we dove into our new curriculum, children and adults alike and made the most of it! We all learned a lot and our interest in this beautiful people was piqued. As our thematic cycle brings the study of the Taino back around, we wanted to be more prepared. We wanted to gather some primary resources, explore the beautiful land of Puerto Rico and make a personal connection to the island and ancestry of our students.

So, a group of us applied to the Fund For Teachers grant in order to make this happen. Guess what? We got it!
 
So, here we are! Jeanne Rachko (our art teacher), Joel Webb (our ELL coordinator), Jada Brown (a K1-K2 teacher) and I (1st-2nd grade teacher) are about to embark on a wonderful two week journey! We are Team Taino!
 
We hope you'll follow us on this amazing adventure! Some places we will visit are Caguana Ceremonial Ball Courts Site , the Taino cave in Las Piedras , Parque Cermonial Indigena de Tibes (Tibes indigenous ceremonial Center) in Ponce, the rainforest, several museums and quaint old towns.  We depart on August 5th and will be sharing thoughts, photos and videos of our time through this blog. Stay tuned!