About

This year, senior kindergarten and grade one students from Meadowlands PS are visiting the Ottawa Forest and Nature School every Tuesday. At Forest School, they discover, hike, explore, build, observe, and most of all play. Back at Meadowlands PS, the students communicate how much they enjoyed visiting the woods every week, as most of us expected they would. But we wondered how will we tie their positive experience back to the expectations of the Ontario Curriculum? What measurable skills are the students developing and what knowledge would they gain?

In order link experiences at Forest School to overall student well-being and achievement, we embraced “learning-based play”, a child-centred approach to acquiring knowledge and skills through experiences, in this case, in a natural setting. Instead of setting a specific curriculum expectation (e.g., students will know how to add numbers to 20 by the end of grade one) and then finding an activity to meet that learning goal, we began with the students’ play and their noticing and then tied what interested them back to the curriculum (e.g., a passion for learning the names of mushrooms has led to math sorting activities). By observing this learning-based play, we have noticed a positive impact on student well-being (e.g., socio-emotional, cognitive and physical). We have also noticed how experiences at Forest School have an impact on student achievement in all areas of the Ontario Curriculum (e.g., Science: Understanding Structures & Mechanisms and Living Things).

Thank you for coming along on this Forest School adventure!

Mme Jacqueline

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