Outdoor classrooms include a variety of features— often including ponds, perennial beds, and butterfly gardens like those pictured at left—and are designed for ease of maintenance.
As much as possible, outdoor classrooms are centrally located on the school grounds to make it easier for teachers to quickly transition from indoor to outdoor lessons.
Outdoor classrooms are designed with the input of the community. This school wanted a geometric aesthetic, providing vegetable beds for each grade level.
Spaces for congregation and reflection are key parts of classroom design. Seating is varied to allow students to sit throughout the garden individually or gather together in one location.
Perennials are chosen for their attractiveness to birds and butterflies, allowing for close study in natural habitats. Gardens are planted with enough milkweed are certified as “Monarch Waystations,� attracting these butterflies on their way south in the fall and north in the spring. The perennials we plant are approved as native or well-adapted by the Native Plant Society of Texas and provide endless lessons on plant life cycles, adaptive characteristics, and interdependence among species.
Students literally get hands-on experience with the animals and insects that are attracted to their outdoor classrooms. These experiences take students’ understanding of life cycles, metamorphosis, and a host of other processes to a level not possible with a textbook alone.
Growing vegetables prompts students to read seed packets, take measurements, and track environmental conditions, all while gaining the life-long benefits that come with growing and consuming their own food.
Signs in the vegetable beds at Withers Elementary (right) gave students a real life application for art concepts learned indoors. Students at Clarke and Helbing Elementary display the food they have grown for their own consumption (below) and as part of an initiative to reduce hunger in their neighborhoods through donations to local food banks (below right).
Vegetable beds provide opportunities for measuring area, perimeter, and volume, as students have to determine how much fertilizer to apply to a bed or how much space they have available for planting.
At I.M. Terrell Elementary (right), children met a professional chef and learned more about career options available to them. They also got to feel a deeper connection with their community by growing food to be served at a local restaurant. Through this project, 5th graders looked at their bed of mustard greens as a system and considered the different variables—including water, fertilizer, and spacing—that they were able to track and manipulate.
Earth Science stations provide a space for digging and building so that upper-grade students can experiment with erosion and younger students can explore the different properties of rocks and soil.
Experience handling and experimenting with rocks representing the different stages of the rock cycle— sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic—provides students with a deeper understanding of geological processes and features.
Ponds like this one at Watauga Elementary can become campus focal points, providing opportunities for children to learn more about the living and non-living components of a water habitat. Ponds also inspire students during quiet reflection and journal writing.
Solar energy—experienced in the garden through panels powering water pumps—becomes real when students witness the impact of cloud movement and overcast days on pump activity.
Rain barrels like these at Rosemont 6th Grade School are not only a great tool for teaching volume and capacity but also provide an opportunity for discussion about the conservation of natural resources and the engineering applications of water transfer.
By installing drip irrigation systems like this one at Lipscomb Elementary, older students learn about the water cycle and conservation, while younger students focus on basic measurement and identifying patterns.
Through creating composting systems on campus, students receive valuable lessons on decomposition, recycling, volume, temperature, data collection, nutrient cycles, and much more. And they experience higher vegetable yields as a result!
Raised beds allow for easier vegetable growing in even the most unconventional outdoor classroom spaces. Students at this school have great success growing vegetables even during the coldest temperatures due to the courtyard’s protection from cold northern winds.
Shade structures serve as a central gathering area for whole-group lessons and focused group work, not to mention enabling outdoor explorations on even the hottest Texas days.
Shade structure design can be tailored to individual spaces. This structure at I.M. Terrell Elementary utilizes a shade cloth which will be replaced in time with cover provided by growing wisteria.