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Outdoor classroom kits available to local schools
WILLIAMSBURG - At its 69th Annual Meeting, the Virginia Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts announced a new project aimed to bring elementary school children closer to nature with use of an innovative means of teaching the outdoors on the school yard.
Today's Standards of Learning include teaching about outdoor issues. Rather than stage such training inside the classroom, the lessons taught outside give students the touch, feel, smell and sight of nature and natural surroundings. Children today are often confined indoors at home due to family pressures.
Recycled plastic buckets are used to carry learning tools outside, like magnifiers, bug boxes, thermometers, rulers and compasses, to capture things that can be further studied indoors. A teacher's bucket contains larger, more sophisticated items but students, each having a smaller bucket, will work in two-man teams to find the target items of the day. Buckets can also be used as seats for discussion time while outdoors.
Each of the 47 Soil and Water Conservation Districts received a gift of one outdoor classroom kit to take home for the purpose of forming a partnership with a local elementary school. Principals, teachers and conservation officials will work to better familiarize students with the natural world.
Private donations to the Association's Educational Foundation have been use to purchase supplies for this new project. Further contributions will assist with expanding the project to the more than 1,200 public elementary schools in Virginia.
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