Building an outdoor classroom on a tight budget can be challenging, but it’s possible with some planning and creativity. Here are some tips for building an outdoor classroom on a budget.

We interviewed five educators once their outdoor classroom projects were complete and found five positive impacts in common among the group: socialization, physical development, confidence-building, risk-taking and creativity.

Teachers can turn trike and bike paths into a learning opportunity. Discover these trike and bike path teaching ideas geared toward early childhood educators that can easily be modified for older children, too.

Good Fieldwork is thrilled to support the Living Schoolyards Act (S-4993) that, when passed, will help make that a reality for more students across the United States. The bill will direct federal resources and funding toward transforming school grounds into outdoor learning environments.

We’ve learned that there are still a lot of questions about the natural outdoor classroom process. To help educators searching for answers about how to get started, we thought it would be helpful to share some examples of how we’ve worked under different scenarios to make outdoor classroom ideas a reality for our clients.

Teachers face a delicate balancing act - on one hand, they want to ensure children reap the benefits of outdoor learning, but on the other, they need to keep them safe from heatstroke, frostbite or other weather-related hazards. Fortunately, studies suggest that time outside in extreme temperatures can be beneficial for children's health and development, as long as certain precautions are taken.

An outdoor classroom builder needs to have expertise in several areas, such as hardscaping, landscaping and environmental planning. The key to finding the right project partner is to do your research and ask questions to ensure that the builder you hire has the necessary skills and experience to create the space you envision. Learn key questions you should ask when hiring an outdoor classroom builder to ensure that you create a safe, functional and inspiring outdoor learning environment for your students.

As an outdoor classroom design-build company, the term “risky play” made us uncomfortable at first. It’s a term cited often in reference to the benefits of outdoor classrooms, and turns out, it’s critical to a child’s learning and development.

Administrators are rightfully focused on budget and finding resources to bring an outdoor learning concept to reality. Here you’ll find some simple yet effective suggestions to help you find eligible outdoor classroom grants for your project.

Designing and building outdoor learning environments has challenged us to look at things through the lens of children, and until we started down this path, I didn’t realize how much my own view of nature had changed. That log I just hiked by and barely noticed, when placed in the vicinity of a child, can become a balance beam, a train, a home for little bugs, a source for peeling bark for further inspection and artistic creation, and on and on. The children that step into these outdoor classrooms find new adventures every day.