Although Contributing to Community and Caring for the Environment has been a part of our focus for the past couple of years, the disruption of the pandemic has really promoted this focus. Many of our divisions spent a great deal of time learning outside this year. As a result, we have, as acommunity, inquired and investigated how best to create flexible and inclusive outdoor learning spaces; how to use resources and materials found outside for our learning; and have learned a great deal about our local, outdoor environment and its plants and animals.

The video below shows many examples of our learning and playing outdoors. 

As we move into next year, we plan on building a new, additional outdoor learning space that is connected to our undercover area. This will provide an all weather, four-season outdoor leaning space. In planning and creating the space, we ask ourselves some questions:

How can we plan this space to be as inclusive as possible for people to access as independently as they are able? What materials are best used? What esle do we need to consider?

In addtion, as part of the process, we will do an inclusivity audit of our outdoor spaces to see what cost-effective changes can be made to our learning and play space.