To really know someone, they say you should walk a mile in their shoes. So students at Yorbita Elementary walked a mile with Shakespeare last Monday in La Puente, then took a midmorning stroll with Thomas Edison on Wednesday.

It’s part of the new Walking Classroom that the fifth-graders joined this year — all thanks to teacher Julie Sosa-Rust, who applied for a grant from the innovative program.

“I read about it on a teacher’s blog, which said it worked well with her class,” the fifth-grade instructor said. “It’s built around the Common Core, so I thought I would see if we could get it.”

Here’s how The Walking Classroom works. Each student receives an MP3 loaded with nearly 100 subjects. Then they walk, while it talks about a subject.

Granted it takes a little coordination, but the Rowland Unified students were getting quite good at it. Of course, you can’t stop to take notes while walking, so they really have to concentrate on the subject at hand.

The La Puente kids know they’ll discuss it afterward with the rest of the class. And it’s hard to talk about something you don’t know anything about.

“The first thing they do back in our classroom is write down all the facts they can recall,” Sosa-Rust said. “It surprised me how much they remember from the audio file.” Click HERE for entire story!