Beginning School – Young Minds In Motion

Outdoor Classroom Enhances Learning and Sparks Wonder and Joy

The Beginning School team will do just about anything to help Rowland Hall’s youngest students learn to love learning—including rolling wagons of books, art supplies, and science experiments to Sunnyside Park for outdoor classroom time. While a focus on indoor–outdoor education has always been a divisional priority, an increased emphasis on outdoor learning during the pandemic solidified the practice, thanks to outdoor classroom’s proven ability to deepen student engagement and build learning stamina through extended, open-ended play. Outdoor classroom continued to be a crucial component of the Beginning School experience this year, exposing students to connections between the natural world and subjects including math, language, literacy, and science.

Preschool Engineers? We Have ’Em!

Enter a Beginning School classroom and you’ll likely have to step over block walls or towers—and right into the middle of a lesson. That’s because blocks provide the perfect introduction to early engineering concepts. This year’s beginning schoolers explored techniques like staggering, plank and pillar, and crisscross, giving them the skills they needed to go big: recreating famous Utah buildings or, as mini city planners, building a block city from their own blueprints. This type of play is not only fun, it’s essential to building a foundation of knowledge around spatial relationships, cause and effect, problem solving, and math. But more importantly, it’s sparking students’ natural curiosity, giving young learners purpose and agency, building their creativity, and helping them see themselves as capable problem solvers.