Fun and Easy Ways to Take Classroom and Homeschool Learning Outdoors

This is a great time of year to take learning outdoors! Learning outdoors can and should happen all year long, but in my neck of the woods, the sun is finally shining. It is springtime, and at last comfortable enough to be outside without 3 under layers and a snowsuit.

So let's take learning outdoors! This post offers strategies, tips, and activities for outdoor learning. Get kids that would otherwise be cooped up indoors learning out in the sunshine instead!

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I have always been an avid outdoors-woman. I was raised with parents that valued and encouraged outdoor play and experiences. An appreciation for learning outdoors was so instilled in me as a child that I went on to get my degree in wildlife ecology and spent the first part of my career working with endangered species.

Then I became a high school biology teacher and I'm now a stay-at-home-mom raising two young children to love and appreciate nature as well. 

I have been feeling on edge and foggy brained lately, and when I feel that way I know it's from one of three things: 1) stress, 2) not enough physical activity, or 3) not enough time spent outside.

​This time, it was all three. So! My family and I hopped in the car and headed south to Whitewater State Park.  It was just what I needed and just what my children needed.

​Study after study has shown the benefits of spending time learning outdoors, especially for young people. The benefits are so powerful that I enrolled my 5 year-old in a nature school. It changed her life.

It's odd that we live in a time that books need to be written about the benefits of being outside. Why do we need convincing? ​

At any given moment we find ourselves with screens at our fingertips. Many students in the US study nature using online simulations and textbooks rather than experiencing natural areas first hand.

I am not saying that screens should be completely thrown out of the picture. As I sit here writing this blog, I clearly have some appreciation for technology. But screens should not replace outdoor time, physical activity, or opportunities to create, imagine and explore, in the home or at school, in my opinion.

As I flip through photos of my recent adventure in Whitewater State Park, I appreciate the number of learning experiences packed into two days. My children put their hands in the dirt, bonded with their father whom they get little time with, inhaled fresh air, gazed at the stars free from city lights. 

My 5 year old walked close to four miles and my darling 2 year old climbed on everything. They learned how to build a fire! They found and made their own walking sticks. They practiced reading a map. They observed and inquired about the natural world. 

In just two days my children were able to do all of this learning outdoors - gaining content knowledge, 21st C. skills, character, and social emotional skills - with no plan, textbooks, lesson plans, lectures, note-taking, or testing.

​It was just them. Just us. Just the great outdoors. 

When I was still teaching at a public experiential high school, much of my curriculum focused around being outside of the building.

As a small, student-led project-based learning school, we were fortunate to have the encouragement and resources to take learning beyond the walls of the classroom - out to the parking lot, to the local river basin, and even trips abroad through our school educational travel program.

Homeschoolers, experiential educators, and stay-at-home-parents like myself have the flexibility to embrace nature-based learning. If you are home with your kids, get them outside if you don't already in any way that you can.

If you are a public school teacher that has the flexibility and support from the district to take learning outdoors, I sure hope you're doing so.

​If you are an educator that is confined to the classroom, check out some activities for outdoor learning below that could be done right on school grounds.

The photos in the slideshow below show my students enjoying various outdoor learning experiences. Many of these photos are from highly beneficial educational trips taken through our travel program.

If you are not looking for activity ideas but are more interested in developing an experiential program around learning outdoors, check out my free 10-point checklist for developing an experiential learning program. 

How to Take Classroom and Homeschool Learning Outdoors

Take every opportunity to get your students learning outdoors. There are a lot of activities for learning outdoors.

But you don't have to have an outdoor learning activity in mind to bring learning outdoors. You could simply bring whatever you had planned for the classroom outside. If you have a lesson that could just be moved out onto the grass, do it.

Best case scenario is that your lesson incorporates natural surroundings. This is easy for project-based learners and life science teachers. For math teachers, maybe not quite as easy. Or is it?  Check out some of these fun integrated activities for outdoor learning.

Take Reading Outdoors

Do you want to get your children and/or students learning outdoors? Inspire the urge to explore, or simply the desire to chill in some fresh air for a few minutes, with books.

Check out this list of great reads that inspire a love of (or at least a respect for) the outdoors. The lists vary by age and purpose. 

• 25 Books for Your Backpack: Nature and Field Guides for Kids - My children has the "The Boys Book of Adventure" mentioned on this list and my son AND daughter both love it. It's bound like a journal, with outdoor activity ideas and empty pages for taking field notes. ​

• Top 50 Children's Books about Nature - The Gruffalo is a favorite in our house, among many many others. Consider reading some of these books with learners OUTSIDE. 
• Best Books about the Great Outdoors - Teenagers are a hard sell. I worked with them for nine years, urban teens at that. Many of them did not love being outside. Introducing books that break down some misconceptions about nature is a good place to start. These books also light a fire in those that are already explorers at heart. ​​
• 10 Outdoor Literacy Activities - These 10 ideas came from the book "15 Minutes Outside" by Rebecca P. Cohen. These activities are geared toward younger children. 

Some of my own children's favorite books

Take Writing Outdoors

What's great about writing is that you can do it just about anywhere as long as you have a pen and some paper. With phones, Chromebooks, Kindles, and iPads on the rise, we can even bring along our mobile devices.

Taking your writers outdoors is a great way to inspire writing topics, remove disturbances and distractions, and give them the space and peace that they need to focus. 
​

• Examples of Outdoor Activities to get your Students Writing  - Applicable to all ages.
• 9 Ways to Take English Class Outside - Ok, I'm noticing a pattern. I like "lists". I'm obsessed with Pinterest, so there you go. This resource is intended for secondary language arts students. 

Take Social Studies Outdoors

• Resources provided by ERIC will bring you to a PDF loaded with social studies lesson plans (grades 3-10) that get kids out of the building. It's pretty creative and makes me want to teach social studies. When you get to the website, look for the "Download Full Text" link in the top, right hand corner. Click on that to get to the PDF.  ​​​​
• Check out these additional outdoor activities from National Geographic's Education Blog - "10 Ways to Take Your Classroom Outside"

Take Math Outdoors

There are a lot of resources out there for implementing math activities for learning outdoors. Most of them are for elementary aged students, a few for more advanced math concepts. 
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• Exploring Math in Nature - A lot of ideas for practicing measuring skills.
• Garden Classroom - A book with hands-on activities for outdoor learning including activities with math. I like this resource because it is multi-disciplinary and get's kids' hands dirty!  
• Fascinating Facts of Mathematics - This resource doesn't give details on implementing math activities for learning outdoors, but rather explains real life applications, in this case, of trigonometry. A lot of trig concepts can be studied outdoors such as finding the height of a mountain.
• Kids Math Activities for Learning Outdoors - This resource is a list of fun and creative outdoor math activities geared toward pre-k and kindergarten children. Great for stay-at-home-parents. Don't forget about free-play though!

Take Science Outdoors

Science learning outdoors is a no-brainer, in my opinion, especially for biology. Simply bring students outdoors, let them observe their surroundings, ask questions, and design experiments. If you're looking for some other creative outdoor learning experiences, check out these science activities for learning outdoors.
​

• Citizen Science - I love citizen science. I wrote a blog post on this last spring. Check out that post for citizen science project ideas. There are loads of them and they are adaptable for a variety of age groups and skill-levels.
• Free Upper Level Ecology Scavenger Hunt and Mini-Project - this gets students outside observing nature while practicing ecology terminology. The kicker is that the final product is a photo gallery, which requires that students not only go into the outdoors, but really awaken their senses in the process. 
• Design and Build a Wildlife Shelter - This activity is a student-favorite, and the resource that I use to implement the experience can be found at the link.
• Outdoor Physics Experiments - Some of these look so fun, I want to do them myself. 
• 31 Days of Outdoor Stem - I LOVE THIS WEBSITE! I love STEM, and I love Little Bins for Little Hands. It is a free STEM resource. I have used several of their STEM activity ideas with my own young children and they LOVE it. 
• Teaching Secondary Science Outside the Classroom - Fun ideas for the outdoors, and includes a variety of science concepts. 

Cross-Disciplinary Learning Outdoors

As an experiential educator, I think it is vital to note that if you can integrate subjects, do! I wrote this post the way that I did, breaking learning activities into subjects, because I understand that many of you, especially high school teachers, teach a specific subject.S

Some of those subjects were not even included in this post!

But taking learning outdoors naturally crosses disciplines. If your students work in a garden, for example, they are gaining math, ecology, and design content knowledge. They are gaining skills in team-work, problem-solving, task-management, creativity, and more. 

If you can, take experiential learning outdoors; learning that is real-world, subject integrated, authentic, and hands-on. 

For example, I've mentioned project-based learning. Have students design and execute their own project-based learning experiences that require being outdoors or involve natural concepts in some way.

Experiential learning activities can be implemented by any teacher that teaches any subject, and the learning experiences can be designed for learning outdoors. 

Experiential Learning Depot's experiential learning activity tool kits are the perfect resources for this approach to learning outdoors.

You might be thinking, "How do I get my students outdoors in the winter?" I know this conundrum better than anyone. I live in Minnesota where it seems to be below zero four months of the year and we get blizzards in April.

Here's what I'll say; even bringing students outside for 10 minutes per day is better than no time at all. You might also consider again starting a student travel program at your school.

You can also consider incorporating the weather and climate into your lessons. Test snow or rain for acid using a pH kit. Calculate relative density of snow, ice and water. Paint in the rain. Write in the outdoors on a snowy day! Even tough weather days inspire curiosity and creativity. 

Taking learning outdoors doesn't have to be complicated. I hope are able to browse and put to use some of. the resources included in this post. Good luck to you, and as always, if you need additional information, resources, or have any questions, please reach out!

Experiential Learning Depot Activities for Learning Outdoors

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