Environmental Engagement

Opportunities to connect with nature are woven throughout our curriculum and through students’ daily experiences on our campus and beyond.

In keeping with our Guiding Principles, we help children learn to care for and respect nature through our robust and established Environmental Engagement Program which includes Camping, Fieldwork, and Gardening.

Starting in Kindergarten, our smallest students camp overnight on campus in their Spring semester. The trips get gradually longer and farther with locations like New Brighton Beach and Manresa State Beach. We focus on creating a safe atmosphere so students can expand their comfort zones and feel empowered to try new things.

Over the years we’ve seen multiple, complementary benefits.

Children overcome anxieties as they spend more time outdoors and become comfortable in nature.
Children develop a greater sense of confidence and self-reliance.
Students gain a better understanding of and appreciation for the environment.
Teachers learn even more about their students’ personalities and behaviors.
Students and teachers grow closer as a class and community due to their shared experiences and reliance upon one another.

Camping

A favorite among our students, these trips are special bonding times for each class. We begin by teaching basic skills such as tent setup, outdoor cooking and cleaning, then build to map reading, plant and animal identification, and basic first aid. As the students get older, they move on to map-reading and orienteering, fire making, and ecology.

Trips often tie into each semester’s Expedition. One year, our fifth and sixth graders spent one semester learning about the American Southwest. They then went on a six-day trip to New Mexico, camping in Chaco Canyon, where they saw first-hand the archaeology and geology they’d been studying.

Fieldwork

Our Helios curriculum regularly takes students out of the classroom to provide real-world examples of what they’re studying.

We don’t call our outings “field trips”, as students are doing actual field work. We rarely use “off-the-shelf” tours. Instead we work to create experiences in the community, which give students the opportunity to conduct research and interview experts connected to the current semester’s theme of study.

This approach allows students to become deeply engage in the subject material.

Garden

Our Garden is a special retreat where children play and care for plants during recess and after school.

Children practice kindness and empathy as they care for the plants and develop a meaningful connection to their food and the earth.

In addition to student-directed play in the garden, they also maintain and beautify the space, participate in large-scale projects such as permaculture design, and do planned experiments like seed-saving, soil tests, composting, and caring for their own garden plots.

"It makes you think of doing things you would never think of doing!"

- Maya, Helios student