Outdoor classroom

Virginia Friedman, long-time Middle School teacher and coordinator of Outdoor Education at TPS, has continued to champion the importance of integrating experiences in the out-of-doors as essential to education at all levels. Virginia shares the history and evolution of environmental literacy at the school.

studies and to collaborate with their educators and restoration staff. Certain parts of the property were unlike anything else in the region. “The Pine Grove is an amazing place for children to explore and learn as they play,” says Kindergarten teacher Elizabeth Zack. “It always felt like we were entering Narnia, with the huge White Pines, carpet of needles, the scent of pine filling the air. Children would work collaboratively and learn about physics as they built forts together.”

In 2021, TPS expanded its view of its “country” program once again, this time to partner more closely with Fairmount Park and other organizations in the region. This allowed each unit to identify sites that would best support the skills, ideas, and developmental needs of its students. The Junior Unit, for instance, takes advantage of the trail network around the Wissahickon Environmental Center for its study of navigation and orienteering. The seventh grade explores the expansive – and nearby! – John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum, one of the region’s premier birding sites, to support its studies of migration and colonization.

Despite the changes in site over the years, TPS’s commitment to outdoor learning remains as strong as it did in JB’s years at Sycamore Farm. She still recalls a time when a student looked out the window of the bus and cried, “Oh look, there’s a cow!”

The Philadelphia School was founded on the principle of “city, country, classroom” – the idea that learning can and should be integrated throughout our landscape. The school’s first “country” site was Sycamore Farm, a working farm in Ambler owned by Chris and Madge Donner. JB Baker-McAllister, who taught in the Junior Unit in the 1980s, recalls the days at Sycamore Farm. The site had horses, sometimes goats, a garden, hiking trails, a stream, and other features. “Students spent most of the time outside,” Baker-McAllister explains, adding that contrary to today, each unit would go out and spend one day a week year round, even in the winter. “It was amazing to see, year after year, kids who overcame the ‘ugh’ factor of being outside, being cold, and really embraced being out there.”

When students arrived at the farm, they got to work doing the necessary chores — building a fire, getting water, starting hot chocolate, and setting up their space. “We also had a garden there.” Baker-McAllister recalls. “I’ll never forget the kids’ faces when we’d go back in the fall, and the kids would see these massive pumpkins. For city kids to see that kind of thing growing, that was a really amazing thing.”

When TPS shifted its country classroom site to Shelly Ridge, a Girl Scout property in Miquon, the farm aspects of the program were swapped for a deeper dive into ecology, and curricular connections to the classroom strengthened. Marco Velis, who taught both Spanish and Cultural Studies in the Middle School (6-8th grades) in the early 2000s, recalls “The Big Dig” project, which began in the fall. Teams of students were tasked with creating a civilization with language, a writing system, history, currency, religion, customs, and tools. They then made artifacts representing their culture, buried them in a secret location, and created a map to help find the site. After analyzing all the surviving artifacts (sometimes the rain or animals destroyed some), they would propose an entire explanation of the found civilization. Every hypothesis proposed by the ‘archaeologists’ not only made sense based on the artifacts, but taught the students how to value evidence and logic over random speculation.”

TPS shifted to the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in 2010 in an effort to situate the outdoor program in the city of Philadelphia, as well as to partner with a site with a strong environmental education philosophy. The Center’s 250 acres provided myriad opportunities to continue ecological

“It was actually a horse,” JB says, “and I remember thinking, this child has never seen that farm animal in person before!” Such joyful moments of discovery prevail. Preschool teacher Pam Holland recalls a student patiently watching a chipmunk at Smith Playground disappear into a rock wall. Moments later, a toad emerged from the same spot, clearly displaced by the rodent. “Pam,” the girl asked with wonder, “can chipmunks turn into TOADS?!”