![]() Many school districts have procedures related to first aid kits and weather protection, so look into these safety regulations before engaging in outdoor learning. Before taking students outside, evaluate your outdoor spaces for common natural hazards, such as poison ivy/thorns as well as potential dangers like broken glass. ![]() 2006) or Cultivating Outdoor Classrooms: Designing and Implementing Child-Centered Learning Environments (Nelson 2012). We suggest acquiring a helpful book geared specifically toward educators teaching in an outdoor environment, such as Outdoor Education: Methods and Strategies (Gilbertson et al. There are many excellent resources relating to outdoor learning that contain classroom management strategies, safety and risk assessment tips, and guidelines for effective learning. Students with unique needs may require additional adult or peer support within the outdoor environment or paved access close to natural settings. School courtyards, landscaped spaces, or even a single tree can all serve as the site for wonderings to take place. 2004) which led us to consider the schoolyard as a place conducive to inspiring wonder as well as promoting all-around well-being in our students.Īlthough our setting had a significant amount of green space, the Wonder Project could occur in a variety of settings, including an urban environment. ![]() Research has demonstrated the numerous benefits of spending time in an outdoor environment (Rickinson et al. As educators looking to inspire children to ask questions, we wanted to provide a forum for children to experience an incubator for ideas, a place where they could use their creativity and interest to begin making sense of the outdoors. Wondering allows children to explore their ideas, thinking and hypothesizing beyond the typical worries of getting things perfect, particularly in the early stages of their thinking. Our efforts were grounded in a belief that children have the ability and interest to generate questions related to their everyday interactions with the world and that utilizing wonder is a powerful means to engage children in inquiry. We led the students in the wonder inquiry process as a station, yet the engagements and activities could easily be applied within a typical classroom. Students in grades 3–5 rotated through 20-minute stations with various teachers during the weekly structured outdoor time the school implemented to provide curricular connections within a natural environment. This article highlights an eight-week investigation during which children engaged in varying approaches that documented their wonderings once per week. This is done by directly connecting an individual’s emotions to science content, which has profound implications for science content learning, including scientific ways of knowing (Sezen-Barrie et al. Using wonder as a pedagogical tool taps into the uniquely human process that connects our intense need to know with scientific practices such as observing, data gathering, hypothesizing, and so on. We defined wonder as placing “the human experience at the center of inquiry process,” which involves noticing interesting or unusual phenomena and posing questions from an emotive place of needing to know (Gilbert and Byers 2017, p. The goal was to facilitate children’s wondering as an inquiry process, which ultimately led to the creation of a school-wide Wonder Project. This project grew from a desire to sustain children’s interest in scientific inquiry through the investigation of their wonders. As educators, we recognize that these moments don’t always happen within our structured days at school, and yet we believe strongly that children are capable of “wonder-full” thinking that connects them to the natural world both cognitively and emotionally. There is something both beautiful and powerful about watching a child’s eyes light up during an investigation, the intensity with which she focuses on an object of interest or the sense of fascination that fuels her explorations. ![]()
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