Educating Children Outdoors: Lessons in Nature-Based Learning

By Amy Butler and Cheryl Charles

Educating Children Outdoors is a resource for educators interested in spending extended periods of time in nature with their students. Bringing over two decades of experience working outdoors with teachers and students, Amy Butler offers curricular guidance on nature-based lessons that align with K–12 education standards and build on the innate curiosity and wonder children have for the natural world.

This book will help the educator:
- Learn successful routines and practices to make learning outdoors safe and engaging
- Understand protocols for real and risky play
- Draw inspiration from real-life stories from other teachers about learning in nature
- Meet NGSS and Common Core standards outdoors with seasonal lessons that are child-centered
- Be part of the movement to support children in becoming reconnected with the natural world and the places they call home

With twenty-five lessons in five units of study spread out across a seasonal school year and appendixes that offer templates for learning, Educating Children Outdoors is essential for educators looking to harvest the benefits of a nature-based curriculum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Comstock Publishing Associates
• Release date: Mar 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781501771927

Amy Butler

Amy Butler is a designer of fabrics and textiles, home accessories, fashion wearables, rugs, wallpaper, wall art, sewing patterns, and craft patterns. She is based in Ohio.

Book preview

Introduction

Teach Who You Are

Journal entry, April 2019

I received a tackle hug first thing this morning as I stepped into the classroom. The first grader beamed up at me and said, Ms. Coyote! I’m so glad you’re here! We have ECO today!

I’ll admit, I get lots of hugs, but this one was a first from this child. I was surprised and curious. As we settled into morning meeting with both classes, thirty children in total, the energy was a bit damp. Not the usual for our weekly Wednesday mornings.

The teacher whispered to me, We have some children needing a little extra care this morning. Maybe it’s because it’s April, the sun is hiding, and the clouds have formed a gray roof over our sky. Or maybe it’s because children are people too; life is hard and some days we start with frustration and tears.

It’s a perfect day to get into the forest, I whispered back.

The children I work with know me as Ms. Coyote or Amy Coyote. In the first few weeks together, spending time outdoors and getting to know one another, they tip their heads sideways and look me in the eye, asking, "Is Coyote really your name or just a pretend name?" I guess it’s real and pretend. Just as the students choose a nature name that resonates with them, and which becomes an animal they get to know with research, I have always identified with the coyote, and so it has become my nature name. Coyotes have always intrigued me. Related to wolves and a distant cousin of our beloved dogs, coyotes are between worlds of domestication and being wild. It’s a bit like how I feel in my role as an educator.

By the time they have all chosen their own special nature names, the questions about who I am and where I live and if I am young or old fade away. At that point, we are deep into our weekly routines of learning outdoors, and the questions have changed as our relationships with one another have become stronger. The children, the teachers, and I are now on nature time, which affords us a different way to build these connections with one another. Our nature names seem to always be a wonderful catalyst for making these connections.

These names are enduring. Some children, who are now sophomores and juniors in high school, I know only by their nature names. Spring Peeper and Jumping Mouse both come to the forefront of my mind. These two children, now teenagers, were some of the many who affirmed my thinking about how every child can benefit from time immersed in nature with their peers and caring adults. The data on the benefits of time spent outdoors, which are only an online search away, were proven when Spring Peeper found her voice each week in the forest. Having not spoken at all in the classroom, and with a possible diagnosis of being selectively mute, she did speak on our forest days, we noticed. It happened slowly at first, by accepting help from Jumping Mouse to climb a steep hill; and then again, later, when she joined in the imaginative and meaningful play of building mouse houses.

Communication is essential when we are outdoors learning and exploring, and it can come in many forms. The same way nature communicates with us through wind, waves lapping on the shore, or two branches clacking together, children outdoors in nature figure out how to communicate with each other with and without words, even at times without the same spoken language. Most days, Jumping Mouse was ready at Spring Peeper’s side, encouraging her play and interaction with others. The child-centered and intense physical nature-based play, along with the natural environment, supported new relationships for these two children, through which they both learned to communicate with their peers. This experience could not be replicated within the four walls of the classroom.

Jumping Mouse helped Spring Peeper build a bridge into the forming social ecology of the kindergarten class in the forest. Forming new relationships outdoors was helping Jumping Mouse too: Where he struggled inside the building in peer-to-peer relationships, he shined in the forest by sharing his familiarity with the outdoors and gifting that to others in acts of caring and kindness. As for Spring Peeper, we soon noticed her growing comfort outdoors and her increased verbal engagement—not only with her peers, but with her teachers, too. We documented these moments and quietly supported the children, allowing our time in nature to be the wisest teacher at that moment.

For many of us who dedicate our careers to teaching, we do it because we care about the future of our youth. We become teachers because we want the educational system to be different and better than what we experienced. And for some, we become teachers as a form of activism. As I started my path toward being a classroom teacher, I knew I could better serve my students and be a happier teacher if I could support children in the way I learn best. For me, that means I need to have choice, autonomy, lots of movement, purpose, and as much time outdoors as possible. When I was an elementary student in the early 1980s I silently struggled through all academic tasks. I kept my head down, behaved, and filled in the blanks. It wasn’t until I was in high school, when I failed chemistry and physics twice, that I was offered an alternative: I could join Future Farmers of America (FFA) and get my credits for graduation that way. Outdoors, tapping maple trees, tilling fields, and measuring the diameter of conifers, I finally found joy in learning. It was the hands-on approach that fired up my brain and ignited my creativity. I felt calm and capable. I discovered who I was as a learner in what a public school system called a nontraditional setting. See, kids like me didn’t join FFA. I didn’t come from a farming family. I was a townie from a single-parent family. I broke the mold in 1992 of possible learning opportunities for kids in my small community.

In most peoples’ eyes, my choice to follow a nontraditional path may have set me back in my learning opportunities, although today I believe I may have been set free. Free to be outdoors, engaging my head, heart, and hands. It was Aristotle who said, Educating your mind without educating your heart is no education at all. When we feel safe in a learning space we can connect with others; when we can connect with others, we develop a sense of belonging. When we belong, we have a community in which to learn and take risks.

Clearly, I am not the only human who learns best this way. As I moved from teaching environmental education to natural history–focused workshops, I witnessed the effects of learning with nature on both adults and children. In these settings, we were learning about nature intellectually, such as the names of plant species and ecological concepts, for example, but we were also learning with nature kinesthetically and somatically, because we were immersed intensively outdoors for long periods of time. As I started teaching elementary students, I asked myself: How can I bring nature into my teaching practice—particularly one in public school? In my role as a speech and language assistant, I began curiously applying what we might now call nature-based lessons. I had been regulated to thirty-minute blocks of time (which end up being twenty) to support students in speech, language retrieval, and sequencing. I noticed that by taking students outdoors for services they could apply and retain new language more effectively based on their experiences with living things. This was my first hint of success. Plus, these young children looked forward to our time together. They willingly left the classroom to join me outdoors to learn about field marks of local birds and document the life cycle of a dandelion. This experience with living things, right outside the school building, had meaning and they were invested in a process that allowed them to learn in a real and authentic way. At the time, the special education department at the school was at first skeptical, and then pleasantly surprised. Much like my nature name, Coyote, I was sneaking around the edges and adapting to the place where I was expected to teach. Now I wondered if I could teach outdoors all the time and weave my experience as a naturalist into my own teaching. Inspired by the work of Parker J. Palmer, I adopted the phrase Teach who you are as my mantra. I know who I am in nature, and this is where I hoped to create opportunities for connection and get to know the students best.

Finding a New Path through the Forest

In 2009, I received an invitation from two teachers and a strong parent advocate of the Union Elementary School in Montpelier, Vermont, which read something like this: We are inviting you to come and help us get our students outdoors every week for learning and exploration. Something isn’t right in our classrooms. Children are struggling in a way they never used to. We think they could benefit from more time outdoors, learning about nature. Please RSVP!

I graciously accepted their invitation, and I used my experience as a naturalist and an educator to work with these teachers, finding answers to these questions: What makes the twenty-first century student different? Can we teach outdoors? What will they learn? Every week I headed to the forests and fields surrounding the school in search of answers, and I was soon presented with much deeper questions. This became the process in which a new pedagogy was created within our ever-evolving questions around what educating children outdoors truly meant and what was needed to do it successfully. My cohorts and I were guided by environmental education curricula, other successful regional nature programs, and the now famous texts such as Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv and Beyond Ecophobia by David Sobel.

This invitation from these teachers to join them in a quiet effort toward education reform planted a seed that became ECO (Educating Children Outdoors). ECO is now a nature-based immersion program of North Branch Nature Center (NBNC). This collective approach between a small nature center and the surrounding public schools grew. The stories shared between families, teachers, and administrators about children learning outdoors spread among our Vermont communities. Administrators saw student behavior referrals go down with the influx of fresh air and reinvigorated minds. Teachers became inspired to teach in a new way, especially in the subject of science. Parent involvement also increased with the new opportunity to volunteer and be outdoors with their child’s class.

As time passed, more teachers and schools joined our social and ecological experiment of spending a half day outdoors every week, and together we shifted how we work with children in nature. These changes came slowly and seasonally, with plenty of time to assimilate and reflect. Teachers and NBNC staff made the time after every outdoor excursion to reflect on and discuss our time together. Over time, how we taught as teachers in an unbound space changed simply because it had to. The required curriculum was being dictated by the weather or the new natural phenomenon that was constantly unfolding around us. Our teacher expectations and edges softened, vulnerability in the unknown was embraced, and we let the children and nature lead on most days. We spent years observing what children are drawn to do in an undomesticated and somewhat wild setting, and then we slowly created standardized lesson plans based on these observations. Teachers experienced, through years of trial and error, how to partner with nature to meet curricular goals. We found ourselves developing a unique co-teaching relationship with the landscape. Plus, each school was different depending on location and what they had access to, be it city parks, town forests, or a corner of the schoolyard. Through all these diverse settings, we worked to create routines of connecting to nature and make them a part of every school week. Some days, teaching outside was amazing, and some days were really, really hard.

Later, in 2016, our reflections on ECO changed and we found ourselves asking, what are the unmet needs of children and families? Where does our school community struggle the most right now? As a nature-based educator, I added to these questions: Can these needs be met through nature connection? In an increasingly polarized time, our inquiries about the effectiveness of ECO now reached past our individual classrooms. Then, in the autumn of 2020, as the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was causing massive school shutdowns, we asked even more questions: Can teaching outdoors be a response to COVID-19? Could more time spent outdoors be a solution to keeping infection rates low? What we continue to advocate for is that our time outdoors for ECO is exactly what children need socially, emotionally, and spiritually. We know that our relationship with nature is a healing salve to this historic time of change and unrest.

Learning with This Book

In these pages you will read about routines for partnering with nature that can be applied in a forested grove, in a city park, on a mowed school yard, or in the strip of brambles and bushes along the edge of the school property. This book not only encompasses science, literacy, and math with its standardized lesson plans, but it also affords endless opportunities for children to learn how to care for themselves and develop empathy for the living world. This is not simply a collection of lesson plans; this is a collection of stories written by teachers and the teacher naturalists at NBNC. The narratives shared here are from teachers who have been pushing the school building doors open each week and stepping into nature with their students. The teachers we partner with have spent hundreds of rainy, cold, muddy, and sunny hours in the outdoors with their students. And the lessons come from the stories, as they traditionally always have.

Chapters 1 and 2 provide the framework for how we get out the door and partner with nature to learn. Chapter 1 introduces the nature-based routines that we have applied in a public school context and explains why these particular routines work for both student and teacher. In chapter 2 you’ll read about a framework for safety that covers how we can care for ourselves and others while outdoors. It also includes information on performing site assessments and ecological impact assessments with an emphasis on caring for the land we are learning with. Both these chapters open with narratives that highlight the habits for learning and safety in the form of a story. Don’t skip over the stories. They hold details that will guide you through why these methods work.

In units 1 through 5 there are twenty-five lesson plans developed in collaboration with public school teachers over the course of thirteen years of teaching outdoors in forests, fields, and city parks across central Vermont. Some lessons are reminiscent of environmental education’s timeless activities by pioneers like Joseph Cornell or have been inspired by leaders in outdoor learning such as Juliet Robertson. Other lessons include community science practices, engineering explorations, and mathematical thinking.

What differentiates the lessons in this book from classic environmental activities we have known is that they have been developed by observing children exploring and playing in nature. These lessons are essentially the essence of children. They are imaginative, flexible, kinesthetic, challenging, joyous, ephemeral, and they are of the forests and fields from which they bubbled up. Of note is that although these lessons are teacher approved and directed, they are meant to bend and sway as the birch trees do. A formal assessment comes when we see the sparkle and shine in the students’ eyes after time spent engaged in authentic and meaningful learning. You as the teacher, paired with these lessons, make it possible for children to follow their biological calling to connect and learn with nature. This book is an example of what is possible, and I invite you and your school community to imagine what your stories could be if you spent time once a week learning with nature.

Why Nature? Why Now?

In a rapidly changing world, I think a lot lately of what’s to come in the next ten years of educating and raising children. As we continue to show up each and every day for our students, we can try to embrace our time in nature as a way to help reduce stress, alleviate depression and anxiety, and ultimately heal. What I know to be the most important truth in this work is that, in nature, there is space for everyone, no matter how you feel or who you are. We are here together, and yet there are places I can be alone with a tree or a boulder. Here, I’ve seen frustration and grief dissolve, the natural world receiving it all and giving back in the form of a babbling brook or a bird song. In the act of reciprocity, I have seen children leave gifts for the forest in the form of ephemeral art and thank you notes written on birch bark. These small offerings between children and nature replicate the very ecological systems in which we are learning every week. This is our human and more than human interconnectedness in action.

Going forward, my hope is that the history and expansion of the ECO program in Vermont could be a story for many communities. Nature is our teacher, easing the mind and heart with no spoken directions. I dream that this work is truly reciprocal: With each visit outdoors, with every animal tracked, and with each fire lit, these developing young humans are in cooperation with nature to design a better blueprint for humanity. One that includes resilience, empathy, and the importance of taking care of not only ourselves but also the places we inhabit and love.

Chapter 1

Nature-Based Routines for Outdoor Learning

If the love of nature is in the teacher’s heart, there is no danger: such a teacher, no matter by what the method, takes the child gently by the hand and walks with him in paths that lead to the seeing and comprehending of what he may find beneath his feet or above his head. And these paths, whether they lead among the lowliest of plants, whether to the stars, finally converge and bring the wanderer to that serene peace and hopeful faith that is the sure inheritance of all those who realize fully that they are working units of this wonderful universe.

—Anna Botsford Comstock, Handbook of Nature Study, 1911

In a hand-drawn image, a swirling cloud of small birds fly over a mountain range.

A Morning at ECO

Narrative by Amy Butler

Like a murmuration of birds, the children run and skip through the open soccer field to our morning meeting place. This active burst of flight was just preceded by a handful of minutes of the students silently observing the morning landscape right outside the school building. In this transition from the building to the outdoors, children and teachers observe the clouds, gather weather data, and listen to the soundscape for birds. I notice icy dew on the grass and share my find with a student. One student’s job for the day is to be the photographer, and they stand in a marked spot and take a picture of the schoolyard tree. There is a collective and purposeful way in which the students and teachers move into the outdoor world. This is not the typical exit from the building for recess; today is an ECO Day, and our routines for learning together outdoors are in motion.

After landing at our meeting place on the far end of the soccer field, some children begin to form a circle and are singing a song they know well: Good morning, Earth! Good morning, sky! Good morning, water flowing by.… The song cues everyone to come together, and the circle continues to grow. Some children on the outskirts are still in tumble mode, and I gather them up and bring them into the formation. Our morning meeting is about to begin, and bodies settle into mountain pose, ready to share. As our song comes to a close, children’s hands shoot up, and our round of nature notes begins. Children are very eager to share what they have noticed in nature this week. A white-tailed deer in their yard, a spider in their bedroom, and the first red leaf of autumn. As the sharing moves around the circle, bodies begin to wiggle. I can see the energy and focus has shifted, and it is undoubtedly time for a game!

Nature notes

A nature note is a shared observation of something a person has noticed in nature. Nature notes may be about the weather, animal sightings, plants or trees, or natural phenomena. Sharing nature notes on a weekly basis brings elements of the natural world immediately into your teaching practice. A nature note is something everyone can access, because nature is everywhere! These observations can be gleaned from a cityscape or while waiting for the school bus. This is an opportunity for students to practice oral language development. It also lays a rich foundation for future storytelling. Nature notes can be recorded throughout an entire school year. What has changed seasonally? What are the common nature note themes? This is an opportunity to practice phenology: the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena.

Our game for the morning is based on a predator and prey relationship of owls and mice. The students’ fascination for a resident Barred Owl has sparked an exploration of owl species in our region, and the predator-prey relationship has been scaffolded in the classroom through reading nonfiction text. The children are primed and ready for our game of owls and mice because they now have prior knowledge of this species. Every outing, we play a game before we move into the forest or urban park to our outdoor classroom. This is a way for students to release energy, get warmed up, and connect as a classroom community. Play is a fabulous facilitator of development in social-emotional skills, and pretending to be animals is a fun catalyst of play behavior. This routine of playing games allows students to practice motor skills and apply some basic science concepts through creative movement. And it also buys us some time as teachers to get everyone out the door, accounted for, and settled into the beginning routines of our morning before we depart any further from the building.

Children wearing brightlycolored rain gear hang on to the railing of a bridge, while two teachers stand at either end of the group.

After a few rounds of Owls and Mice, children are signaled to gather their backpacks with the sound of a chime. Once again, I can hear a pack of children begin to sing unprompted! The two classes hustle to the edge of the forest, ready to hike up to our basecamp. Within this transitional routine we have safety procedures so embedded that this organized chaos falls into line surprisingly quickly. A safety sandwich is formed by the adults, and students are counted. Our magic number of children for the day is twenty-five.

Bread is established and sandwich fillings are now prepared. Today I decide to make two safety sandwiches, because I know there is a front group of runners eager to explore, and another group that relishes the idle morning chatter found on the trail. It is just a good day to meander and soak up the benefits that the fresh air and open space give us. As the children and adults enter the forest, some slip on their quiet fox-walking feet. I notice students balancing on one leg and reaching down to put on invisible socks. This fox-walking routine was introduced last year in kindergarten, and the children still practice this threshold ceremony as they enter this wild space. A few children greet the forest with a Hello! and Thank you. Our morning has just only begun.

ECO basecamp

A designated undomesticated and somewhat wild space in nature that serves as a gathering place for learning and exploration. The basecamps can be on school property or public use land. These sites are mitigated for hazards (see appendix 4), surveyed for their plant and animal species (see appendix 3), and adopted for use by schools. These spaces are visited on a weekly basis and serve as an outdoor classroom.

Safety sandwich

A safety sandwich is a simple safety protocol for traveling from point A to point B with a group of children. One adult (and student helper) is at the front of the line as a piece of bread and another adult (and student helper) is at the back of the line as the other piece of bread. The children are the filling of the sandwich. Be sure your sandwich doesn’t lose any filling and ooze out! The pieces of bread are responsible for keeping everyone together. Sometimes it’s helpful to have two sandwiches!

Magic number

The magic number is another built-in safety protocol that involves the students in creating a habit of counting students and being aware of who is here today. There are lots of ways to count the magic number, depending on students’ ages. Sometimes we are in a rush, and it is easier to count them ourselves. When I don’t include the children, someone always reminds me: Stop! We haven’t counted the magic number yet! The magic number is counted during transitions—after games and activities when children have been spread out, at a trail or street junction during travel, and always before leaving the school grounds and before leaving an outdoor setting. Designate a student to be the magic number holder of the day and have them count or confirm the count at these check-in times during the session. The Magic Number practice was inspired by Juliet Robertson, outdoor play advocate and teacher.

Teaching and Learning with Nature

The previous narrative is a glimpse of an ECO session that could be happening at any public school. Efforts to get students outdoors on a weekly basis have continued to sprout in elementary schools all over the country. From Forest Fridays to Woods Wednesdays and, yes, even Terrific Tuesdays, the evidence of children finding new paths of learning through forests, fields, and in city parks is evident. Teachers and parents have wanted for something different, and nature-based programming is delivering something new. As word has spread, a collective understanding of the benefits of this time outdoors has grown. Kids love the days they have ECO; it has become a favorite day of the week.

With the growth of nature-based programming across the United States also comes a plethora of resources out there for teachers, from books to blog posts to hashtags and Facebook groups to podcasts and oodles of flashy Pinterest pages. It’s a lot to navigate, and finding ways to make it work for your class can be daunting. Common concerns start to emerge in the form of questions: How do we bring students safely outdoors? Will they be focused enough? What about the curriculum? And then sometimes there’s this one: I don’t know anything about nature!

All these questions are important. What I want teachers to know is that teaching and learning outdoors, every week with nature, is possible. How this practice looks here in Vermont will be