Guest Post: Reconnecting Students with the Earth

This is a guest post by Molly N., a teacher and a blogger at beinspiredtoteach.


Go outside. I don’t mean take a break outside, although that is a good idea too. I mean make your classroom extend beyond the walls.  Reconnect with the earth, the sounds and smells and textures that have been here long before we were.

Last year I focused on using the outdoors as a classroom at least once a week.  My 6th grade English students and I began our outdoor experiment the way most of us have been trained to react to the environment — with a sense of caution and guilt. Caution, because we have learned that the environment is dangerous, full of less than ideal temperatures, bugs, dirt, water, sunshine, precipitation, pollen and small animals. Guilt because we associate being outside with wasting time, goofing around, slacking off.  Our society has us believing that academics and therefore real learning can only happen in a room with chairs, desks, and pencil sharpeners.  Movement is discouraged and excessive movement is treated as a dysfunction of some sort.  So as we sat in the grass, breezes blowing our hair,  we tumbled and stretched and sprawled and ran.  None of these behaviors would be tolerated in a school building.  So weren’t we breaking some kind of rule– or even a school law?

But we did it anyway.  Every Thursday we lined up with or without our coats, hats, boots, umbrellas.  And we walked down the hall, walked down the stairs, walked through the doorway, and then without a cue from anyone, as we crossed the threshold into the daylight, we broke into a run, howling at the sun, across the grass toward the tiny patch of prairie that had been preserved but ignored for years.  Instinctively, energy poured from our voices and our legs and eventually our minds. We sat in the shade and talked about the age of the earth and the breadth of the sky.  We collected metaphors from nature, we examined bugs and seeds and roots and wove them all into exciting short stories.  We read Rachel Carson and Ray Bradbury and wondered “what if…” as we watched the planes fly low over our heads.  We told ghost stories sitting in the heart of the prairie, surrounded by six-foot plants.  We leaped over a creek and got covered in mud.  When January dumped 3 ft of snow on us, and the temperatures fell to zero, we sculpted the snow into blocks and figures, painted it with colorful jello and then shared a huge pot of vegetable soup to warm up. We marched through the rain to see how stretches of blacktop and Kentucky bluegrass were connected to the frequent flooding our school basements experienced.

The coolest project though, were the creation of Dream Gardens, the ideal outdoor learning environment through the eyes of an 11 year old.  These gardens were fun and beautiful and serene and playful. But most of all, they were innovative and educational.  They included mazes and forts, patterned flower beds, vegetable plots, spheres to climb in and learn about, fields to scrimmage across, and underground trails to explore.  Imagination is a child’s greatest strength, but how can it survive in an unresponsive environment? By making the outdoors a place to which we belonged, and which changed day by day, our imagination was allowed to thrive.

If you have never experienced the exponential, lotus-like unfolding of a mind set free, then this is the time to make a new space for yourself  beyond your door. Upon visiting it regularly and interacting spontaneously, I bet you will find yourself connecting to life, to your work, and to your passions, with a new breath of inspiration.

And that’s what we are here for, right?


Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by guest posters are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute for Humane Education or its staff.

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