One of the projects we worked on during COVID lockdown this past Spring was expanding our outdoor classroom space.
As a forest school we spend first half of our day in the forest and mountains. But around lunch time we hike back to our school cabin for some learning projects.
Even before COVID outbreak we did most of our learning projects outdoors, rarely going inside the school cabin during the warm months of the year. We already had a set of tables and benches built underneath and around a beautiful evergreen in the school yard. There we had all our meals and worked on the art and craft projects, see two photos below.
Expanded outdoor classroom:
Simple and functional
We wanted to add an additional space where we could also have a blackboard for our Waldorf-inspired lessons, set up a thematic board and table with some learning visuals and some cozy reading areas.
This additional outdoor learning space came out cozy and charming, giving us plenty of space for our thematic nature table and board, blackboard and comfy chairs for reading. All while enjoy the beauty of outdoors, hearing birds chirping around us and feeling breeze on our faces.
By the way, take a look at this earlier article on our blog about connection between shortsightedness and lack of outdoor time.
Also a beautiful play space
It also served us as an outdoor space where we could bring out all different toys that normally stay inside the cabin, such as dollhouse and dolls, trains. This way we could stay exclusively outdoors, with only exceptions during those brief afternoon mountain showers.
