Year in Review - Outside Classroom Walls
Reflection is key to growth. As I look back at Opt Out’s first year, I am filled with overwhelming gratitude, which leads to a sense of peace and pride, which then sparks motivation for the future - how can we make this even better next time around? Before I get ahead of myself, I’d like to reflect on what went well, the core elements that will carry us forward.
As the name suggests, Opt Out values time in the natural world, asserting that student learning can and should take place outside classroom walls whenever possible. This past year, I’m happy to report we managed to embrace the Scandinavian mindset: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.” This allowed us to appreciate natural, seasonal rhythms in a way that felt incredibly grounding. We jumped in chilly waterfalls, foraged for berries, and picked pumpkins in the fall; gathered greens for wreaths, laced up skates and tried every sledding hill we could find in the winter; zipped up dry suits to explore The Narrows, snowshoed through GNP, and searched for signs of spring, finding fungi and new sheds right here in our valley. I’ve worked in schools that have a 10º indoor recess policy - it’s been such a welcomed change to prioritize spending time in the great outdoors, showing students how to gear up in accordance to the weather and to value of the mental/physical health benefits of seeking spaces to ‘be’, to breathe! Isn’t this a big part of why we all choose to live here?
Supporting Student Stories:
A diligent student expressed concern to his parents around conference time. He felt we had been spending too much time outside and hadn’t done enough “school work”. What if he’d fallen behind friends who were attending online school?! To him, learning meant sitting at a desk, reading from a text, working through problems or writing responses. He wasn’t registering that the poems he’d written in his journal at the park, the books he’d collected and read at the library, and the math games he’d played online qualified as “school work”. Testing revealed he had made progress, even beyond his grade level.
My teacher heart still sparkles when I recall his realization.
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The second week into our time together, a fourth grade sweetheart sat down on the Mt. Ellis trail to cry it out. The sun was beating down, and after 30 minutes of walking she could see how much farther we had to go before we made it to the tree line, the start of our foraging adventure. “I didn’t know we’d be spending THIS MUCH time outside!” she wailed as she applied a band-aid to her scraped knee. By mid-year, she’d blossomed into an adventure-loving, confident hiker who encourages others along the trail when motivation is needed.