Learning In Our Environment; Learning From our Environment

The 2-3s have been spending lots of time outside. The children exercise and play on our land. They commune with nature. We take Brain Breaks outside to help the mind relax and refocus for the next activity. We spend time on Friday afternoons doing Muddy Boots with the K-1s.

Being outside enlivens the whole child, raising spirits and engagement with a task. We study and explore through both structured and unstructured experiences. So far, most of our science classes have been spent outdoors. Our outdoor explorations are multidisciplinary, supporting language and literacy development, observation and hypothesizing, focused problem solving, and purposeful social interactions. 

Our time outdoors frees the imagination. Children engaged in the natural world just stop...and observe intensely. They naturally seek and discover patterns. They sort and organize. Their "noticings" are recorded, in words and pictures.They rush to each other to share their findings. Quite simply, they are fascinated. By everything.

This fall's big theme, How Our Land Changed Over Time, will keep bringing us back to nature. We are first learning from and about Parker's landscape. This study has opened with the children thinking through a recent dramatic change in our environment--the addition of our pond. They recalled what our "backyard" used to look like and processed what impact the pond has had and further changes that might be afoot as a result of it. From where we are today, we will work back in time, exploring what used to be here on our land, both in the recent and very distant past.

Our study is a perfect fit for this group of explorers. 

By the way, we're also having lots of fun!!