Outdoor Prekindergarten

Laurel’s Outdoor Prekindergarten allows significant outdoor hands-on learning for four- and five-year-old students that combines a play-based curriculum, nature immersion, current early childhood research, and personalized learning opportunities.

List of 3 items.

The Yurt

Our Yurt makes the Butler Campus accessible year-round and provides a home base for days with inclement weather. The Yurt's central location on the Butler Campus creates a springboard between nurturing out student's natural curiosities in the forest around us and extending learning opportunities with enriching classroom experiences.
The Forest

In the forest, and away from highly structured indoor curriculum, children make their own choices about how they spend their time and how to manage their own body signals. They become empowered, engaged and highly motivated learners who understand that their acquisition of knowledge is as limitless as the sky above our heads.
The Curriculum

The Outdoor Prekindergarten provides a curriculum that ensures children are developing the skills that are necessary for them to be successful in Kindergarten while also gaining the resilience, grit, motivation and creativity that comes from learning in the forest.

Outdoor Prekindergarten School Curriculum

List of 4 items.

Language Arts
Skills
- Verbal expression
- Listening comprehension
- Literature
- Phonological awareness
- Writing process
- Research
Content
- Initiate and sustain conversation
- Using new vocabulary
- Negotiating compromises and resolving conflicts
- Formulating questions
- Using descriptive language
- Sharing thoughts and ideas clearly
- Distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction
- Retelling stories
- Contextual understanding of stories
- Recognizing upper case letters, some lower case letters and some beginning letter sounds
- Counting and understanding syllables
- Rhyming words, synonyms and opposites
- Understanding linear orientation of print
- Journaling
- Using writing instruments correctly and writing his or her name
Social Studies
Skills
- Understanding diversity
- Socialization
- Geography
- Understanding communities
Content
- Identifying and naming plants and animals
- Respecting living things
- Awareness of and respect for differences of thoughts, ideas, likes, dislikes and abilities
- Understanding the concept of being a friend
- Developing independence, responsibility and self-help skills
- Learning to negotiate and compromise
- Understanding geography through mapping, compass directions, natural resources and habitats
- Team building activities
- Establishing routines
Mathematics
Skills
- Weights and measurements
- Sequence of events
- Counting
- Visual perception/spatial awareness
Content
- Using units of measurement for making comparisons, estimations and predictions
- Pattern identification
- Calendar
- Seasons
- Sense of time, including planning for future and remembering past events
- Classifying, sorting and grouping
- Identifying shapes
- Matching like objects
- Using natural materials to understand how things work in relation to each other in space
Science
Skills
- Hypothesizing and making predictions
- Observing using all senses
- Developing a sense of curiosity
- Mapping
- Understanding cause and effect
Content
- Stewardship and understanding our responsibility through composting, recycling and understanding linked ecosystems
- Identifying native plants
- Understanding life cycles and life spans
- Learning about habitats and ecosystems
- Observing seasonal changes, hibernation, migration and weather
- Mapping