I talked to teachers at a handful of schools to find out how the outdoor facilities have affected everything from science curriculums to behavior management.

ELLIS MENDELL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

When the Boston Schoolyard Initiative begins the process of creating an outdoor space, they start by talking to the community about the wants and needs of their teachers and students.

For the Mendell School, Klopfer Martin Design Group incorporated several features, like a lab workspace and planting beds, into the school playground.

Klopfer Martin Design Group

The school's science specialist Elizabeth Hadley uses the arbor with a pulley system to teach her fifth grade students about simple machines. The meadow and woodland area come into play when she covers ecosystems and food webs. Her second-grade students collect bugs under the logs and then apply lessons from their classroom to determine whether or not those bugs are insects.

Klopfer Martin Design Group

The outdoor space has also become integral to Hadley’s work with a diverse student body. The outdoor space “levels the playing field,” she said, for students from different backgrounds and for students with special needs. “The amount of background knowledge and experiences of going outside and exploring nature that kids bring to the table can be drastically different…Even if they’ve never had any experience before with touching animals or looking for animals in their habitats, they are all doing it at the same time. They can all talk about it together.”

These outdoor experiences can be especially crucial for ESL students, who can use new science vocabulary in its context. “Because students internalize [new vocabulary] best when they are exposed to it in multiple ways, in different kinds of contexts, I find that the language they are using is a lot higher when they’ve had a chance to experience it in multiple settings,” she said.

YOUNG ACHIEVERS SCIENCE AND MATH PILOT SCHOOL

Christian Phillips Photography

At the Young Achievers School, administrators had to create a space to accommodate an influx of younger students when the school went from being a 6-8 middle school to a K-8 school. Before the renovations, teachers held recess in a parking lot and struggled to encourage play while keeping the children safe. The new outdoor space was designed to encourage “nature play,” a term for informal interactions with natural materials, like logs, gardens, and trees.

The uses for Young Achievers School’s outdoor space “aren’t quite so clearly specified,” Johnson said. For example, the logs in the outdoor classroom are used as balance beams during recess and the decking is used as a stage or as a fort. Bo Hoppin, the school's experiential education coordinator, said, “We didn’t want our outdoor classroom to be just a classroom, we also wanted it to a place where kids could come as a recess alternative to interact with nature in a non-formal way.” Hoppin believes that nature play “stimulates cognitive development and definitely helps with behavioral issues and challenges that we have.”

Bo Hoppin

The outdoor space is also used for formal instruction. For example, in a myth, legends, and folktales unit, students read the Native American story of the Three Sisters Garden. Then they learn about the agricultural practices of Native Americans while planting a Three Sisters Garden in the outdoor classroom. The unit also ties in science instruction, when the students learn about the structures of seeds and plants.