What is Outdoor Classroom Day?

Last Thursday, for the second year in a row, we joined more than 16,000 schools and 1,776,156 children around the world for Outdoor Classroom Day. In 2018 more than 3 million children were involved in this initiative, which is ‘a global campaign to celebrate and inspire outdoor learning and play.

Outdoor learning improves children’s health, engages them with learning and leads to a greater connection with nature. Play not only teaches critical life skills such as resilience, teamwork and creativity, but is central to children’s enjoyment of childhood.’ (https://outdoorclassroomday.com/).

We were not too worried about the weather, as both children and teachers in ECC have learned to appreciate and value the learning we do outside, rain or shine. To start us off, Ms Marisa read the story ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ and then we followed her across the playground in a ‘real’ bear hunt, which ended with us finding a bear in our very own playground – can you imagine!
After our Pre-Nursery peers joined us, we had lots of opportunities to enjoy our outdoor classroom: between the parachute, the mud kitchen, checking how our plants are growing, joining Mr Riccardo for some games, bubbles, chalk and playdough, the morning went by in a snap and it was already lunch time, outside, of course, with a big thanks to Ms Lucia and Ms Giuliana who served us lasagne ‘al fresco’!

The day ended with story time under the trees and shared tidying up. The high level of engagement and enjoyment reminded us, once again, why we so firmly believe that outdoor learning is essential to our ECC curriculum!

Ms Nilva
Kindergarten teacher