Outdoor Learning Highlight: La Farge Schools

Outdoor Learning Highlight: La Farge Schools 

This fall our current context has highlighted the benefits of outdoor learning in new ways. For La Farge Schools students and teachers, incorporating the natural world into academic pursuits is nothing new. Inspired by our beautiful surroundings, LFS teachers frequently make opportunities for students to apply new concepts within our local context. 

Learning outside spans a variety of different content areas within our 4K - 12th grade school. We've shared some highlights here in the spirit of getting outdoors to build context and experiential learning for students.

Early Literacy (4K - K) One of the primary components of becoming a reader is learning letter names and sounds. LFS early childhood teachers often embed these skills within outdoor learning. Attention to shapes and the differences among them is a great introduction to the alphabet and helps children learn how to distinguish between letters. La Farge Schools’ early literacy teachers have embedded these skills within outdoor learning experiences in several ways. Teachers take young children outside to look for letter shapes in natural items, such as forked stick shaped like a Y, or a smooth rock reminiscent of an O.

Recently, our preschool teacher, Mrs. Greenwood, took young learners outside to collect leaves, which they glued onto a line-drawn L. These “L is for Leaf” pages will be combined with other letter/contextual item pages to make a real-world alphabet book for each child.

High School Agricultural Education: Natural Resources

Mr. Fowell regularly visits the La Farge School Garden to plant and harvest with his agricultural science students, as well as to identify weeds. Additionally, he and his classes often travel to the nearby Kickapoo Valley Reserve for class-embedded activities such as bird identification, duck house maintenance, pheasant release, tree identification, and more. 

High School Social Studies

History teacher Amy Lund regularly has her students practice outdoor surveying, and her classes go on walking tours of the town. As a part of her Local and/or Wisconsin History courses, she takes students on walking field trips of the local cemeteries and frequently relies on the expertise of local historian Brad Steinmetz pictured below with students this week on a visit to the Kickapoo Valley Reserve dam site.

Middle School Math

Mr. Chroninger often takes his students on "fraction walks" where they look for collections of items with the natural world around them to practice mathematical concepts. For example, he may ask students to find the ratio of oak trees to pine trees in a particular section of the park adjacent to our school. Taking students outside to collect, measure, compare, and graph gives students real-world applications.