Outdoor Classroom

How do you protect nature when you don't have a relationship with it? The answer is, you don't. Keep Knoxville Beautiful is working with the Knoxville Botanical Garden, Ijams Nature Center, Knox County Schools, and Carol R. Johnson Associates to create an outdoor classroom so that children may be educated and hopefully inspired to protect our environment.

Keep Knoxville Beautiful is able to help create this educational environment through a grant received by Waste Management and Keep America Beautiful. This future STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) Classroom is located at the Wallis Butterfly Meadow a the Knoxville Botanical Garden. Sustainable Future is generously donating a solar powered water feature for this project. Support has also been garnered from WBIR and Cortese Tree Specialists.

The goals of this project are to reconnect children and families to the outdoors in a free learning environment, while engaging all the senses, and child-initiated activities that encourage intrinsic motivation, full engagement, and active learning. Today’s children are becoming more disconnected with nature. Gone are the days when children ran outside and made up their own games using their imagination.  Having an outdoor classroom encourages outdoor exploration in an intentionally designed space to foster meaningful learning. Youth will benefit from rich and versatile open-ended, natural materials.                         

This simple “classroom” will increase concern for the environment, increase a sense of wonder and imagination, increase language and collaborative skills and increase knowledge and understanding of geographical and ecological processes. The curriculum based around this new project will increase analytical, problem solving and critical thinking skills.