HIGHGATE — Students at Highgate Elementary will spend more time outside this school year thanks to its brand new outdoor classroom.
Funded by some of the district’s federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief money, the outdoor classroom was constructed over the summer by a builder from Sheldon.
Highgate is now the second school in the Missisquoi Valley School District, following Swanton, to build an outdoor classroom.
Principal Yeshua Pastina said his vision for the wooden, pavilion-like structure was for it to be a “community classroom” and that’s why it’s situated on the recess fields halfway between the school and Route 78.
“We really want it to be this resource that even the community can access,” he said. “It’s a great space to go outside and do some hands-on learning.”
And hands-on learning is at the core of Highgate Elementary as a project-based learning school.
Project-based learning is an instructional approach designed to give students the opportunity to develop knowledge and skills through engaging projects set around challenges and situations they may face in the real world.
Pastina said students in the past might have been asked to complete a poster project to explain what they learned. Today, the project itself is what is driving the learning.
School leadership and teachers are still in the early stages of figuring out how the outdoor classroom will be used, but some students have already spent time in the space.
MVSD partners with Kurt Valenta, of Exordium, to offer environmental education and natural science programming in each of its schools. Pastina said Valenta has used the outdoor classroom for some of his lessons this fall.
Students looked at and classified leaves and bugs, and talked about the history and purpose of the Highgate Dam.
Research has shown that outdoor learning can have huge benefits on student mental health and academic performance, according to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Students are often calmer and better able to focus when learning in nature, and teachers have reported better behavior and social interactions with fewer disciplinary issues.
“There is something about when you leave the classroom and go out,” Pastina said. “It's not even just the experiential learning you get, but the feelings and thoughts that come with nature.”
