Outdoor Learning
Why it matters
Middle schoolers are ready to stretch themselves a little. Outdoor education gives them plenty of chances to do that- to try something unfamiliar, work through frustration, rely on other people, and realize they’re capable of more than they thought.
Our 40-acre campus gives students room to do that as part of their regular school week, not just on special field trips off campus. And as students get older, the experiences get bigger too. Trips and adventures away from campus give them a chance to put their skills to use, take on more responsibility, and learn what it feels like to do something that seemed hard at first.
8–10
2
40
3
“Everything from how to shoot a bow and arrow to how to rationalize denominators to how to make and keep amazing friends.”
daily • the groundsThe campus is the classroom
Class moves outside because there is somewhere to go: forty acres, with hiking trails, open fields, an outdoor education classroom, three ponds, and a bubbling creek. Science happens at the ponds, wildlife gets tracked in the woods, and students help build the trails they walk. Middle schoolers seine the creek, kayak and fish the ponds, and write at the picnic tables when the light is good. The unstructured hours count for as much as the scheduled ones! Lunch and recess happen outside, in a middle school where nobody is holding a phone — which is what turns free time back into something that involves other people.
“I went from a massive school with 600 kids to TLC Middle School which had about 50 students 6-8. Before I only went outside during recess, and now I am outside multiple times every day.”
physical educationPickleball in the driveway, disc golf on the fields
Team sports run on the open ground — volleyball, flag football, and visiting coaches who come in to run field hockey and lacrosse. The driveway is also the basketball court. Calisthenics happen where there is room to line up, and disc golf gets set up across the fields. What a middle schooler gets is the run of forty acres and a PE class that goes outside in the same weather everything else here goes out in.
“Giving me time to go outside and learn to make fires or play volleyball.”
outdoor educationA lot more than a field trip
Outdoor education is a real part of TLC Middle. Our students spend time outside throughout the year learning skills, trying things they may never have done before, and taking on bigger challenges as they become more confident.
Middle schoolers might find themselves hiking or backpacking, kayaking, rock climbing, whitewater rafting, camping, shooting archery, building a fire, whittling, building a shelter, learning to navigate with a map and compass, working in the garden, tagging monarch butterflies, or wading through water underground in a cave.
There’s plenty of fun in all of that, but there’s also a lot of growing up. Students learn to be prepared, work together, solve problems, take reasonable risks, and discover that they can do hard things.
“It’s for making other things important too — like giving me time to go outside and learn to make fires or play volleyball. It’s for letting me be free before I go off to high school and sit in class all day.”
fall and spring overnightThe trips, read as curriculum
Every class goes away twice a year. Essentials & Extras covers what those trips do socially — the fall trip turning a class into a group, the thing graduates are still writing about years later. That is a real function and it is covered there. Read the other way, the trips are the assessment. Everything in the skills list above is practiced on campus and then carried into a place where it has consequences: the fire has to light, the pack has to be carried, the map has to be right. Difficulty is the point, and the staff let students solve things rather than solving things for them.
“The experience of getting to go out into the woods with 14 other people twice a year is actually more fun than you would think.”