It seems that nearly every business these days is asking you to be an “insider” and sign up for their loyalty club, with the promise of great rewards if you join. For this post, I want to repurpose this “insider” idea, borrowing a tag line used by L.L. Bean. Instead of being an insider, they challenge their customers to be an *out*sider. (To their credit, there is nothing to sign up for, and no rewards follow. It’s just a challenge to get outdoors more.)

So what might being an outsider mean as we think of the school year ahead of us? I’d like to encourage you to take up the challenge and find new ways to make sustained, creative use of the outdoors with your kids. Through your partnership with LREC, you already have an outdoor project planned that links your school ground to your time with us. But… can you go further? Can you move closer toward having outdoor experiences be a normal part of the school day, and not a special project? Some of you do this as you lead amazing nature-based art projects using material from your schoolyard or neighborhood, while others use outdoor experiences as a catalyst for creative writing. All good. One of my interests is in working with kids to use data to understand the world around them. For example, when I was teaching full time, my third graders graphed the changing length of daylight (from sunrise to sunset) over the course of the year. They lived this every day, with later sunrises in the morning, and dusk creeping into the late afternoon. As winter moved into spring, these trends reversed. To track this, the kids made weekly updates to a large poster-sized graph that showed these changes. When I had the kids again for science the next year, we organized data on temperature and precipitation from St. Louis, and compared this data to conditions in other parts of the world. This information gave context to the kids’ field investigations, and enabled them to compare local ecosystems with distant places. What can survive where, and why? Again, regular engagement with data connected the kids with their outdoor experience, and helped them to understand the world they live in.

What can you do this year to make being an outsider a normal part of your kids’ identities? Drop us a note and share your ideas, or ask us for help in thinking about ideas. We go to work every day to help you succeed with your kids. Let us know what we can do.