Exploring Ashley Hall's New Outdoor Classroom for Early School Students

WRITTEN BY RACHAEL CARTER AND ANNIE BELLETTIERE | PHOTOS BY BRIAN PRINCIPE

As teachers in Ashley Hall’s Reggio Emilia-inspired Early School, we facilitate our students’ learning through a variety of means –providing them with natural materials, planning activities based on their interests, and asking open-ended questions. We do all of these things to create an environment that is stimulating and engaging for each child. What setting is more exciting than the outdoors?

Studies show that exposure to nature is beneficial to the cognitive, physical, and emotional development of all students, regardless of age. Outdoor activities naturally help young children in particular develop essential motor skills like coordination, agility, balance, and dexterity. Being outdoors also encourages young children to take risks and builds self-confidence and resilience.

Today, more than ever, children need opportunities to connect with nature. To foster this connection, students in the Early School have been taking field trips to Ashley Hall’s Johns Island Campus since 2017. Fondly known as the Nature Retreat, this space was created by faculty, including our Early School Atelierista Wendy Robbins, who saw the need for our students to spend more time exploring the natural world. In 2020, however, the pandemic would temporarily halt our nature excursions.

When we returned to campus, many teachers were grappling with uncertainty. But to our surprise, the new year exceeded all our wildest expectations because we spent a lot of time outside. The children played joyfully uninhibited outdoors, expressing their thoughts, their ideas, their understandings, and their fears in a myriad of different languages. They ran, climbed, jumped, and tested the limits of their strong bodies. They splashed in puddles with abandon. We frequently visited the beloved Ashley Hall Bear Cave, listening to the sounds of nature by the reflection pond, collecting natural treasures, and observing patterns in nature.

That year challenged us all to be better teachers–to listen more and talk less, and to truly let the children lead. That challenge, as well as the rapid growth of the Early School, sparked renewed interest in building an engaging outdoor learning environment for our Early School students on Ashley Hall’s campus.

Under the leadership of Early School Director Diane Fletcher, we set out to feed the needs of our students and our thriving program, which has nearly doubled in size in the past four years, by intentionally creating a new space – an outdoor classroom that parallels the experience teachers offer each and every day indoors.

In October 2022, Nature Explore, a nonprofit program that is part of the Dimensions Educational Research Foundation, visited Ashley Hall to develop a comprehensive and practical design for a sustainable and nature-rich outdoor classroom. The goal of the Nature Explore program is simple: help make nature an integral, joyful part of children’s daily learning. Through their certification program, their team helps educators create an array of defined outdoor spaces that support the developmental needs of young children and provide opportunities for children to explore with a multitude of open-ended materials.

Nature Explore experts met with Early School parents, teachers, students, and administrators to gain perspective of our collective vision. During their visit, they listened and brainstormed with us, and they also conducted a workshop to train all our Early School educators on the importance of nature and its positive impact on learning as well as how to create open-ended provocations for children to discover. From there, we worked collaboratively with an outdoor classroom designer and education specialist to turn our dream into a reality.

As of March 2023, the N.E. Miles Early Education Center at the College of Charleston has the only certified Nature Explore Classroom in the state of South Carolina. Our new space is slated to be recognized as the second as we have successfully incorporated the program’s national standards. But it was also important to us to honor, celebrate, and highlight the history and traditions of Ashley Hall when creating our new space.

Our School’s founder Mary Vardrine McBee was known for her gardens and her green thumb. During her tenure at Ashley Hall from 1909 to 1949, plants bloomed all over campus. We wanted the campus to abound in full bloom once again with rows of garden beds that community members could cultivate with native plants that invite pollinators. We sought to create a place where we could inspire children to be thoughtful conservationists and stewards of the land they call home for perhaps some of the most formative years of their lives.

In February, the Early School hosted a panel discussion of “Nature’s Last Hope” by Douglas Tallamy. It was an inspiring evening of discussion around native plants led by faculty members and parents, and it inspired us to plan our first ever Ashley Hall Planting Week. For this special event, children created personalized invitations to their families to invite them to our School to plant a variety of native plants in our newly established garden beds.

Most importantly, we wanted our outdoor classroom to be a space with endless possibilities for connection – connection with nature, connection with one another, connection with the larger community, and cross-curricular connections that reflect the Ashley Hall learning spiral. Its evolution, just like nature, will continue to change and flourish over time as long as we nurture it.