Outdoor Classrooms

​At VMS, the outdoor classrooms are an extension of our prepared indoor environments—offering children rich, hands-on learning experiences that align with the seasons, the natural world, and their own developmental stages. These spaces are alive with movement, curiosity, and joy—for both children and teachers.

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As winter thaws and the landscape awakens, even our youngest students notice the changes: birds returning, buds appearing, and sunlight lingering a little longer. Indoors, seeds are started in flats. Later, the children transplant their seedlings into pots, prepare garden beds, and—once the soil warms—move their plants outside.

Each step of the process is done with the children.

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The gardening experience is naturally integrated with art, music, and literature. Children make seed mosaics, sculpt clay bird nests, glaze flower pots, and sing songs about what plants need to grow. Picture books bring to life the stories of other people’s gardens, building empathy, wonder, and connection.

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Once the gardens are planted, the rhythm shifts: watering, harvesting, taste-testing. Summer brings new activities—experimenting with sink and float, hammering nails into stumps, sawing, gluing, labeling, crushing eggshells for the gardens. In the fall, children harvest vegetables and prepare them to share with friends, gaining a joyful sense of contribution and community.

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Our outdoor environments are intentionally designed to promote creativity, confidence, and resilience. Central to this are two essential elements: loose parts and risky play.

Loose parts—logs, ropes, crates, tires, tree stumps, and other open-ended materials—invite endless invention. There are few rules, no instructions, and no expected outcomes. Children collaborate, build, deconstruct, imagine, and reimagine.

The work is self-directed, self-correcting, and deeply engaging.

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We also embrace healthy, developmentally appropriate risky play. Climbing, balancing, jumping, lifting, stacking—these aren’t just physical feats. They’re exercises in

decision-making, self-trust, and judgment. Rather than shielding children from every risk, we teach them to assess and navigate it with awareness and confidence. With attentive observation and gentle guidance from our educators,

children learn how to stretch themselves—

safely and with purpose.

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In a world that often over-sanitizes childhood, our outdoor classrooms offer something rare: freedom with responsibility. It’s messy. It’s meaningful. And it’s exactly what children need to grow strong—physically, emotionally, and intellectually.