This week our class attended a local elementary school to help a grade 2 class with their Take Me Outside Day activity. I love this program and the initiative it shows for promoting outdoor learning. My ultimate goal as an aspiring educator is to eventually run my own K-6 (maybe even K-12) outdoor school. I believe that nature can teach us so much more than we give it credit for, and that we waste so much potential when we stuff kids into a stuffy classroom. It was fun to get outside with the students and connect with them, but some of my connections lead me to believe that this activity could have been executed a lot better. Most of the kids were pretty upset that they didn’t see any animals and some of them stated that “If we would have gone to the lake, we would have seen some”. It was pretty cool though getting to talk to them about this and asking questions like “Why do you think the animals like the lake better?” or “Why don’t you think we are seeing as many animals here?” they all gave me fairly accurate answers such as: “Well the animals like the water for drinking and because they can find lots of food around there” and “The animals don’t want to come around here because there’s lots of dogs that come here”. It was nice to hear them making these kinds of connections to nature and their environment. I also felt like the boundaries were way too strict especially considering the adult-to-kid ratio was basically 1:1. I felt like we didn’t need a boundary but rather a rule of “Stay with in eyesight of your adult”. Also, the area that was enclosed by the boundary was pretty sad. Both of my students were finding more litter than they were natural materials for sculpture building. Overall, great activity, poor execution.

In researching the Take Me Outside Day website, these were some cool activities I found that I’d love to try in my classroom one day: