About the Project

This past school year, due to trying to mitigate the Covid-19 exposures at school, we moved our kindergarten classrooms outside to our play yard. One of the benefits of this process has been the level of engagement we have noticed in our students working outside and our lack of resources to support this process and expand their opportunities to the next level. Most of our students live in multi family households with little access to safe outdoor spaces and unfettered outdoor exploration. With this grant our goal is to provide the powerful learning opportunities that occur when students explore, self direct, collaborate, and learn through meaningful outdoor play experiences. We experimented with an outdoor classroom by hobbling together materials and we realized how powerful and effective our program could be with developmentally appropriate materials to incorporate into our play yard setting for 4 classes of Transitional Kindergarten and Kindergarten.