5 Outdoor Education Routines You Can Start Right Now
Ready to take your students outside but haven’t quite gotten your whole outdoor education program off the ground? Great news: you can get started right now with these 5 easy routines.
1) Opening Routine
It’s always nice to start your outdoor sessions with some sort of ritual or routine. It helps your students truly “arrive” in nature, both mentally and physically. Opening routines also provide a great way to connect with nature and each other, and to remind them why they came all the way out there in the first place. As an added bonus, opening routines tend to make kids feel like they are part of some sort of secret club, which, it goes without saying, they LOVE.
Your opening routine can be as simple as saying, “Welcome to the forest, scientists!” or “Good morning, trees! Thank you for having us today!” However, I recommend trying to kick it up a notch and personalize your routine in some way. This is a great opportunity to solicit ideas from your students, which in turn gives them a sense of ownership and dramatically increases their enthusiasm and participation rate.
Other ideas to try:
- A special clap or hand signal
- A song, either something original or adapted from a classic
- A special object, sign, or emblem that is brought out during the Opening Routine.
- Rotating leaders- give different kids a chance to lead the routine each day
2) Sit Spot
If you’re trying to incorporate more mindfulness into your daily life, Sit Spot is for you. Sit Spot is a dedicated time (usually just a few minutes) where kids and grown-ups sit quietly and observe nature. The only rule is no talking. It can be done anywhere– on the playground, at a park, in your backyard, or in a forest. No special materials required. Sit Spot works best when children are by themselves, or at least separated from other kids by at least a few feet.
Start with a short amount of time–maybe even just 30 seconds for the youngest kiddos. Gradually, as they build their Sit Spot “muscles,” you can increase the time to 5 minutes or more. As soon as you start to notice their focus dissipating, it’s time to stop and bring them back to the group. Sit Spot works best when children can return to the same location each time, but it can also be fun to mix it up and compare one Sit Spot location to another.
3) Journaling
Chances are you’re probably already having your students do this in some form, so this one should be easy! In my class, we ended each of our forest sessions with quiet journaling time in the classroom. (Note: individual journaling can happen simultaneously with Floorbook– more about that below). I provided each student with a durable poly-cover composition book (like these) at the beginning of the year, and they used it for weekly Forest Friday journaling as well as for various other science journaling activities.
During journaling time, I usually provided a Guiding Question related to the day’s focus lesson, but I also let the kids have a lot of freedom in choosing what to write or draw about in their journals. The only requirement was that it needed to be at least loosely related to what we did in the forest that day.
4) Floorbook
Floorbook is a large-format, student-created living document used by students to capture and record their experiences in the forest each week. The inspiration comes from Clare Warden’s Talking and Thinking Floorbooks. A new page is added to the book each week (or each time you go outdoors). I used a 24″ x 36″ medium-weight tagboard for pages. Each student gets a chance to contribute to the week’s page by drawing or writing about what stood out to them from that day’s time in nature.
To minimize traffic jams and make sure everyone gets a chance to contribute, I recommend I sending kids in groups of 4-5 to work on the Floorbook for about 5 minutes at a time. Kids who are not working on the Floorbook can write or draw in their personal journals.
Once all students have added their contributions, the class comes back together one last time to admire the page and summarize their day in nature. The teacher can add a few summary statements on the page to capture the students’ thinking. As the year goes on, the students usually start doing this themselves.
The Floorbook should be stored somewhere where kids can access it and look at it throughout the week. It also makes a great end-of-year souvenir for your students. I always had a parent volunteer to take pictures of each page and turn it into a photo book for each kid to take home in June.
5) Story of the Day
If you do some version of a Closing Circle or End-of-Day Share in your classroom, you’re already halfway there with this one. Story of the Day is an opportunity for students to reflect and share about that day’s outdoor education session.
At the end of each session, before heading back inside, gather your group together (usually by sitting in a circle) to share what stood out from the day. Sometimes there might be a specific question to answer, such as, “What clues did you find today?” or “What’s something that surprised you today?” and sometimes students get to choose what they share.
During Story of the Day, I recommend using a special Talking Stick or Listening Stone to help everyone remember whose turn it is to share. Only the person who is holding the Stick or Stone is allowed to talk, and everyone else must listen to them. The talking object is passed around the circle.
If you have a particularly large group, I recommend splitting into 2 or even 3 smaller groups (ideally with at least one adult facilitating each group) for Story of the Day. The smaller groups promote a more focused, respectful sharing time.