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Boundary Waters Canoe Area

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Professional Development for Teachers

Outdoor Academic Programs for Students

The mission of Green Earth Outdoors is to help all people, but particularly the young, understand, experience, and enjoy the natural world in a responsible way that will instill in them lifelong values regarding the global environment.  The goal of our Professional Development program is to provide educators and administrators with tools, training, support and resources to offer outdoor learning opportunities for their students.  

Outdoor workshops are offered year around to teachers, administrators and informal educators who prefer hands-on instruction and learning by doing.  Workshops may include using a map and compass and how they work with features of the earth; exploring and examining a natural habitat and how it sustains life; paddling down a river or a lake and seeing the connection and interaction of the land with water; or understanding the impacts of humans on nature and learning ways to renew and co-exist, to name a few.  Our workshops prepare teachers for future outdoor teaching experiences with their students, including field activities and lessons that meet academic goals and state standards in such areas as team building, earth sciences, ecology, social studies, and math and history in nature.

Integration Residency

Green Earth Outdoors also offers an integration residency program for schools.  This residency programs consists of three steps.  Before starting the steps, it is important to identify teachers and classrooms participating in the residency program.  The segment of the school population participating can range from one grade level, several grade levels or the entire school.

Planning

Green Earth Outdoors will meet with the participating teachers to create a plan to integrate the outdoors into classroom teaching.  In this meeting teachers decide on specific state-mandated curriculum standards to address during the residency.  It is important to note that this plan is not something extra to add to the classroom teacher’s responsibilities, but a teaming of the “outdoor expert” and the “education expert” to provide a creative way for students to experience and process new knowledge.  Residency time-frames are determined by the number of participating classrooms and the size of the planned project.  Part of the plan will include a customized schedule created for the residency. Your residency dates do not need to be consecutive.  

The Residency

Once the Plan is created Green Earth Outdoors will work with participating teachers and students in their classrooms.  During the residencies, as decided in the plan, Green Earth Outdoors will work with the teacher and students on activities, exercises and experiments that address specific state-mandated curriculum standards.

Sharing Knowledge

Each Green Earth Outdoors residency culminates in a public presentation (parents, PTO, etc) of what has been learned by the students during the residency.  In the culminating activity, students are given the opportunity to share their knowledge learned during the integration residencies.  It is a true celebration of nature and education working together to make connections across the curriculum.  

Field trips can also be incorporated into the residency program.

If you have any questions or wish to schedule a Professional Development workshop or Integration Residency, please Contact Us at your convenience.