Why This Teacher Made Her Students Go Outside All Day — And Other Schools Should Too

In day-long, outdoor kindergarten classes at Vermont’s Ottauquechee School, teacher Eliza Minnucci tells Yahoo Parenting, “Kids look forward to school in a new way.” (Photo: Ottauquechee School/Facebook) 

Rain or shine, spring or winter, kindergarteners at the Ottauquechee School in Quechee, Vt., have their lessons outside every Friday — for the whole day.

Teacher Eliza Minnucci started the program last year, holding the outdoor days at the beginning of each week and calling them “Forest Mondays” at the kindergarten-through- grade-five public school, now getting national attention for their outdoor-education initiative. (Exhibit A: An NPR profile on the program published Tuesday has gotten nearly 16,000 likes and more than 8600 shares on Facebook in just two days.)

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In an era where recess is being eliminated in public schools to give more time to test preparation and video games are replacing sports for many children — who are spending more than 7 and a half hours each day indoors on average, according to the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) — it’s no wonder the idea of outdoor education is resonating with children and parents alike.

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“Kids look forward to school in a new way,” Minnucci tells Yahoo Parenting about the effect she’s seen on pupils brought into the woods once a week at Ottauquechee, where kids work together to build forts, fire pits, dams, and complete their traditional lessons, as well as enjoy a 10-minute session of quiet alone time to observe nature. “Students for whom school is already a chore at age 5 get excited about school again and find belonging in a way they hadn’t yet.”

(Photo: Ottauquechee School/Facebook)

Part of the reason she believes it works is the opportunity being outside provides children to gain more personal responsibility. “That’s a big part of the learning to be done by 5- and 6-year-olds, whether it’s deciding to walk in a stream when it’s 40 degrees out, remembering to wear their hats, carrying their own lunches on the hike to the woods, or figuring out what are reasonable risks to take when tree climbing, running in the woods or belly-sliding down icy rock faces,” she says.

(Photo: Ottauquechee School/Facebook)

The social-skills-building aspect is a big boon too. “Students who don’t take to the pretty intense academic setting indoors find confidence in the skills they have that are valued in the woods,” she adds, “like hauling 40 pounds of maple sap in a sled to be boiled down over the fire in March, or identifying beech, maple and oak leaves, or taking care of striped-back salamanders.”

(Photo: Ottauquechee School/Facebook)

Research supports the idea that changing up the traditional desk-and-chalkboard classroom experience has long lasting benefits. “Outdoor education programs can help students of all abilities and backgrounds to become highly effective, high-performance learners,” according to The NWF’s 2010 report Back to School: Back Outside, How Outdoor Education and Outdoor School Time Create High Performance Students. “Educational research supports the simple idea that the larger the number of environmental variables we expose children to, the more inventiveness and creativity we will observe…[And] research indicates that additional time spent in physical activity may bring about increases in students’ grade point averages and help them to have better ability to concentrate, sharper memories and greater school satisfaction.”

Take The American Institutes for Research (a not-for-profit behavioral and social science research organization) and their work with the California Department of Education on a week-long outdoor education program for sixth graders in 2005. After just one week, they found that the students who participated in the classes held outdoors, compared to a control group who remained indoors, raised their science scores by 27 percent.

“A 2004 meta-analysis of 150 outdoor learning research studies conducted between 1993-2003 found that there was substantial research evidence to suggest that outdoor adventure programs are associated with positive outcomes for young people,” the group details in a report on their findings, “including attitudes toward the environment, independence, confidence, self-esteem, locus of control, self-efficacy, personal effectiveness and coping strategies; and interpersonal and social skills, such as social effectiveness, communication skills, group cohesion and teamwork.”

(Photo: Ottauquechee School/Facebook)

That’s a lot of research to prove what Ottauquechee principal Amos Kornfeld tells Yahoo Parenting is a no brainer. “Nobody said learning has to be within four walls,” he says. “All the things you could do inside to teach kindergarteners, building, working on their letters and such, you can do outside as well. And we knew it was good for kids to be outside where there’s a constant array of stimulus for your senses. There’s always stuff to discover and the kids are just fascinated with everything.”

But just because his school, set along the Appalachian Trail, offers an easily engaging woods setting, doesn’t mean that other institutions can’t replicate the outdoor day in their own way. “We aren’t not doing anything that should be looked as that magical,” he says. “But I do hope it spurs people to think that learning doesn’t have to take place in the classroom. Just use the neighborhood you’re in.”

(Photo: Ottauquechee School/Facebook)

Minnucci – who has since left her teaching post at the school to stay home with her new baby – believes that any experimenting that schools can do to move learning outside more is a good thing. “It works for all types of students, ‘A+’ kiddos, ‘underachievers,’ kids with speech delays, kids on the spectrum,” she says, noting that parents were eager to participate too. “The outdoor model is a tremendous place for learning.”

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