Teaching and Learning in the Outdoor Classroom

The outdoor centre is a special fenced-off space in the yard where students can work safely in a hands-on learning environment, outside the constraints of a traditional classroom. There, they engage in soil study, pond study, growing different plant. It is a great place to teach science but it can be used in many other contexts, for instance for writing and mathematics.

Implementing the QEP
Using the outdoor classroom as a focus for doing constructivist science is part of the school's strategy for implementing the QEP.

"Constructivism is all about building knowledge. Our students have kept journals on plant changes, writing descriptive and comparative passages on the changes in a particular plant or the change over a season of an ecosystem. Math has been part of this as well. Problem solving has been a constant factor, designing and building compost bins, building a garden shed, designing and creating scale diagrams for a gazebo, organising the layout for a pond and garden plots. Within the next couple of weeks we begin building the gazebo students designed in the outdoor classroom. This will be a space where students can get extra shade but also a spot to sit and write or work in whatever fashion necessary. I like to think of it as a meeting centre." Donna Sinclair

Extending the classroom

Cycle 2 and cycle 3 teachers, Donna Sinclair and Patty Leonard, see the outdoor classroom as an extension of the classroom in many ways. For example, while working on a social studies project, students learned about agricultural practices of the Iroquois. As a result, they planned and planted a garden in Iroquois fashion, mixing the seeds of the "three sisters" so that they supported each other's growth. They have received a grant to develop the connection between the science curriculum, the cross-curricular competencies and an outdoor learning environment. They strongly believe that a good part of the science curriculum can be taught effectively in an outdoor classroom through a project-based approach that makes room for multiple intelligences, learning styles and while creating a setting for a student-centred approach.

"The beans give oxygen to the corn that is in the middle. They give shade to the sqwash. The sqwash holds the roots of the corn down." Students

The outdoor classroom offers a setting to observe students in action and note the competencies that they demonstrate. They show remarkable autonomy, a capacity to organise their work and to co-operate to complete a task, all of which are readily and easily observable. All students are completely engaged. Moreover, they are able to demonstrate and explain what they have learned.

"What's really neat about this school is that the teachers don't do the work for us. We have to figure things out for ourselves." James, student.