Posted October 7, 2010

By Lara Christensen, Donor Relations Officer

Kids love to play, and when you take them outdoors they are happy to combine their playing with a good dollop of learning. Enter Outdoor School. 

Outdoor School provides children with an experience of a lifetime. It’s an educational best practice as well.

The genesis of Outdoor School was in 1970, when a few Oregon teachers began taking their students camping for up to a week. The teachers worked with parents to create a program that would help their children learn outside of the classroom, all while camping, hiking, cooking and sleeping in the great outdoors.  

Today, curriculum is tailored by teachers and school administrators so that communities choose what to show students about their local ecosystems. Most Outdoor School programs focus on the basics, like writing and math, by using science techniques including journal writing, aquatic sampling, and land or forest survey methods.  

Students rise at dawn to do chores at the camp and end their days singing and doing skits around the campfire. Most of these young Oregonians don their rain jackets at least once during a week in the western camps, and some students get to see the stars for the first time if their school goes east of the Cascades for a program. 

Learning in an out-of-classroom environment has been shown to promote better standardized test scores, allowing students to integrate what they’ve learned and effectively apply comprehensive skills to academic questions.  

The Oregon Community Foundation’s Environmental Education Program began supporting Outdoor School in 2007 through the encouragement of the Gray Family Fund. Since then, with the help of many donors, OCF’s Environmental Education Program has supported over 70 ODS programs across Oregon. Our goal is to enable every fifth or sixth grader to attend a best practice Outdoor School.

Students learn about the life cycle of Salmon near the confluence of Williams Creek and the Applegate River

Students in the greenhouse

ODS is by far the best program that I’ve witnessed for its ability to take students from all walks of life and immerse them completely in the content they are learning about. In terms of authentic student engagement and enduring understanding of what they learn, nothing compares to Outdoor School. 

–  David Wierth, Science Teacher, Portland Public Schools