The Brockton School Outdoor Education staff has invited Megan Zeni, a practicing teacher in an outdoor classroom and a PhD student in the Faculty of Education at UBC, to design a 4-part series on Outdoor Learning K-7. This 4-part series is open to teachers from other schools who may be interested in this topic. Megan Zeni is an advocate for playful learning outdoors in the school context and she believes that in a perfect world there would be no classrooms and kids would play to learn outside all day. The 4-part Outdoor Learning series aims to cover topics such as classroom management outside; preparing outdoor spaces for imaginative play; the use of loose parts outdoors across the curriculum; strategic ways of teaching maths, sciences, literacies, humanities, arts, and ADST design curriculums outdoors; school gardens as shared spaces of cross-curricular learning; intentional use of an emergent curriculum outdoors; intentional use of unstructured play as a framework for learning; assessment outdoors and specifically, how we can make learning visible within a pedagogy of play. The impetus for such work has never seemed so timely as many of our schools are taking their learning outdoors.
At Brockton we are in our 8th week of Outdoor School – with lots of lessons learned and many more areas for growth. Our Grades 1-5 Outdoor School program gets lots of positive feedback from our students, who often remind us that Outdoor School is their favourite day of the week. We look forward to working with Megan Zeni so that we can continue to enhance what we are already offering. A few photos included provide a peek into what we have been up to over in Lynn Valley. The Outdoor Learning series with Megan Zeni is open to all schools from the ISABC with a total cap of 25 participants and will be run virtually. Teachers interested in participating are encouraged to contact Megan Miller, Outdoor Education Coordinator at Brockton School.
