| School Newsletter - July 2025 | ||||||||||||||
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| Aug. 21-22 |
Arizona's 2025 IDEA Conference Phoenix, AZ www.azed.gov |
| Sept. 15-18 |
Fall Leadership Institute Washington, D.C. www.nhsa.org |
| Sept. 22-24 |
Wellsness Symposium South Lake Tahoe, CA www.headstartca.org |
Using the Outdoors as an Extension of Your Classroom
By Cecilia Cabrera Martirena
For many years, teachers have known that allowing children to be in touch with nature on a regular basis generates huge changes in the child’s brain. However, it is a fact that children in urban schools are becoming more and more distant from nature for a number of reasons, such as this technological age we live in, parents’ beliefs that spending time to be in nature isn’t schoolwork, parents’ worries about children getting dirty, or even our own misconceptions as teachers. To find the time and space to offer children the chance to be in contact with nature, it’s important to create or visit amazing natural scenarios.
Contact With Nature Has Benefits for Students
Children need nature to generate strong connections related to skills development, emotional intelligence, and problem-solving, among others. There are advantages of growing up interacting in a natural context—children with nature-rich school playgrounds are calmer and are capable of concentrating for longer periods of time than those children who attend schools that have few natural elements.
Children who regularly interact with and are connected to the natural world develop stronger awareness of the environment and the importance of taking care of nature, as well as stronger reasoning and observation skills. Children who play outside, in natural surroundings, are more creative, are better problem-solvers, engage in more imaginative games, interact more with their peers, and get used to collaborative work.
I invite you to follow the tips below, which I developed as a teacher with different age groups of learners, to get your class closer to nature and allow learners to benefit from that contact at the same time that they continue working on the topics and skills development associated with their corresponding curriculum.
Engagement with Nature Can Cover Multiple Content Areas
You can work creatively and collaboratively with other colleagues to decide the content to be taught in each nature immersion day.
For example, if you visit an urban park every week, you can focus on different content areas:
Math: Consider the size and shape (perimeter/area) of the park or the area of the park you’re visiting.
Science: Observe and learn about the growing needs of the plants and trees in the park, considering sunlight, soil, watering, and pruning.
Art: Notice the light and colors in nature. Find out where colors in nature come from, how they are created, how they can be transferred to other contexts and materials.
Physical education: Move around in a nature-rich area. Encourage learners to use their bodies to move around—jumping, skipping, running, walking, crawling.
There’s much to learn about teaching and learning in a nature-rich learning context. However, if children are allowed to interact freely for at least part of the school time, they’ll naturally show teachers the path to the best and most effective approach to fulfill the expectations in the curriculum.
Invite nature into your class. Let children interact with it and lead the learning process. Allow yourself to be pleasantly surprised.
*Excerpts taken from “Using the Outdoors as an Extension of Your Classroom”
by Cecilia Cabrera Martirena
www.edutopia.org – Edutopia, George Lucas Learning Foundation.
Call us anytime at 877-222-6070.