Feb 12th, 2023
BRINGING THE OUTSIDE INSIDE YOUR CLASSROOM
Bringing the environment into your classroom and classroom instruction provides many learning opportunities for students. But most importantly, it's a lot of FUN! Numerous articles including Nurtured by Nature highlight the benefits of time spent in nature including; improved attention, lower stress, and better mood. However, when we look at today's classrooms - inspired by ideas on websites like Teachers Pay Teachers or Pinterest - we see a lot of identical commercially produced classrooms. For example, printed anchor charts and decorations that make each classroom "cute". With all the benefits of nature, why aren't we bringing more of nature into our classrooms? Here are some tips for how YOU can bring the outside inside your classroom!
Classroom Plants
Perhaps one of the easiest ways to bring the outside inside is by introducing a plethora of plants to your classroom! Having a variety of different plants will help teach children about plant life cycles and plant differences and similarities. Want to take it up a notch? Instead of bringing in your own plants from home, involve students in the process from the beginning by providing them the opportunity to plant seeds themselves! Students will take great pride in caring for plants and watching them grow. To ensure everyone has a turn, include "Botanist" as one of your classroom jobs.
Besides improving the classroom air quality, plants offer plenty of learning opportunities for students from measuring and graphing the growth of plants in math to hands-on learning opportunities in science as they learn about what plants need to survive and thrive.
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Bulk Up Your Library
Another way to bring nature into your classroom and for students to develop environmental stewardship is by introducing them to a variety of books about nature and animals. You can introduce nature books to your students during classroom read-alouds and have your favourite titles available in your classroom library for silent reading blocks or free choice time. When selecting books try to have a mixture of fiction and non-fiction reading material. Here are some great titles to consider!
Nature Art
A fun way to brighten up your classroom is by having students create nature art masterpieces that you can display on your classroom walls! Go for a stroll with your students around the school challenging them to find unique items on the ground in nature to craft with. Students can freely choose what items to collect or you can create a fun scavenger hunt list of different nature items to search for. Encourage students to collect items of different shapes, colours, and textures. Once materials have been gathered, it's time to create some nature art pieces! Here are some pictures for inspiration!
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Leaf art
Leaf art
Environmental Education
As teachers, it is essential that we plan activities in our classrooms with the curriculum in mind. Here are two great additional resources produced by the Ministry of education to check out that will help you as you guide students along their paths in environmental education!
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Endless Possibilities!
There are so many ways that you can bring the outside inside your classroom and into your classroom instruction! The ideas mentioned here are far from an exhaustive list. You may consider; bringing natural manipulatives into the classroom for math activities in numeracy and patterning, having a daily weather check-in and logging the weather, adopting a classroom pet, or simply if you can do some lessons outside - GO OUTSIDE!
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With all the endless possibilities, the question is ...