Imaginations are blooming in our Outdoor Play Garden.

PreK's outdoor time is ripe with imaginative play.  Of course, no one mentions they are actually learning and applying new skills and knowledge.

This is a "haunted house, just look at the ghosts inside".

They're building "a house with a place in the middle to sit and read".

Or you can "put things together cause it's fun" if you have the right tools.

Sometimes it's important to just "be big".

We can also "stay in our cars and just talk for fun" with our friends.

An Outdoor Classroom grant from Lowe's helped us get this space developed.  We use the picnic tables for our manipulative stations and have 2 sand/water play tables, a playhouse (thank you Hay girls), an area for digging up "treasures", open area for cars or ball play, and a dry channel last year's 5th grade created that we use for exploration.

Soil, Water and Plants.

We are getting ready for Spring with our Plant, Soil and Water studies, and using our math and language skills along the way.

The real world application of the skills the students are learning in their core classes connect their learning to Wellness and Ecology, provide the opportunity to use the skills, and give students an understanding of how the skills are used outside of the classroom.

Third grade will be spending most of the semester becoming botanists.  They are investigating the landscape around the school to discover the plants we have.  And of course, this gives us many opportunities to use the outdoors for our classroom!

Second grade is starting with general soil studies.  They are digging in and finding what makes soil.  

Of course, it's all about the grubs, which are the larval stage of beetles, not worms.  Notice the legs, worms don't have legs.  Every 2nd grader will tell you that.