Mother Nature was our first teacher, but throughout the years, we have neglected her knowledge in favor of lessons from dusty textbooks. But now, more and more local schools are trying to take their students back to the basics.
Gilbert Elementary, a K-5 school in Walker County, Georgia, and Ivy Academy, a charter high school in Hamilton County, are environmentally themed institutions that build nature into their curriculums. Both schools accomplish this by taking students outdoors to help them understand subjects they’d normally just read about inside.
So far, the results have been astounding. According to Gilbert’s principal, Matt Harris, a long-term study of the students in the school’s “forest kindergarten” – who spend half the day outside learning, rain or shine – revealed that, academically speaking, they are slightly ahead of their peers. State-tested data has also revealed that Ivy’s students are slowly and steadily improving each year, reports the school’s executive director, Angie Markum.
With all this progress being made, we thought we’d sneak a peek into some of the outdoor classrooms to find out just how the teachers are turning state standard lessons into outdoor adventures.
MATH
Kindergarten: Instead of working with abstract numbers and being told that 1 + 1 = 2, Gilbert’s kindergartners gather numerical data from their chickens and use it in their math class. That way, they can actually see that 2, 6 or 12 eggs were laid.High school: Ivy’s students use rocks and sticks as manipulatives for algebra and geometry, but their system is more complex than it sounds. For example, one geometry lesson arms the teens with protractors and sends them to measure the angles at the tips of different leaves. By determining the sum of each measurement, they are able to predict what tree species each leaf fell from.