Small Middle School
Successes:
Our outdoor classroom is regularly used by Environmental Science classes. It is an excellent place to rally students when working outdoors. It is also a great place to conclude or wrap up a class after you completed a core classes' outdoor lesson. Our front habitat is used to start and end lessons. We observed bird houses and their behavior. The classrooms are great places to get guest speakers to take students. They are also great places to get the students out of the class and thinking in a different perspective.
Challenges:
The original challenge with this project was removing all weeds and grasses from the area before we started construction so they wouldn't easily infiltrate later. Working the soil and creating holes for our benches was difficult because the area was a high trafficked area by staff and students prior to building the outdoor classroom. Both of these jobs just took determination and student power to complete.
Our first outdoor classroom was built by an Eagle Scout.
That was an easy way to get the project done without a lot of stress added to the teachers. When we built our second outdoor classroom using funds from the National Wildlife Federation, if was difficult keeping the scope of the project small. I attempted to put all of the things I envisioned in the outdoor classroom there at one time. It is always a good idea to plan big and then implement the project in stages that can be completed and then easily added later.
more