Sharing Experiential Learning with Bay Area Educators

Our colleague, Susan Humphries, MBE, MA, traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area from England at the end of September to collaborate with Green Schoolyards America and our colleagues on four days of public events. She shared a wealth of knowledge and expertise in teaching methods that are based on outdoor experiences and a deep understanding of both the natural world and child development.

“It is only once all the senses are engaged that we can begin to immerse children in learning.”

— Susan Humphries

Ms. Humphries is the Founding Headteacher of The Coombes School in Berkshire, England, which is famous for its ecologically rich school grounds and the child-centered educational model she pioneered. Her work at Coombes over 50 years has influenced outdoor experiential education for schools around the world. We were honored to collaborate with her and treasured the experience.

The four events Green Schoolyards America created with Susan Humphries and and other partners included:

• A two-day experiential outdoor learning conference for teachers, held on September 27-28, 2019 in El Cerrito, California. (See previous post about this event)

• A special workshop for early childhood educators in San Francisco, held on October 1st with San Francisco Children & Nature and other partners

• A one-day program for Green Schoolyards America’s Principals’ Institute, held on October 2nd in Oakland

The article below describes the two October events in more detail. This was a fascinating and action packed week! We are grateful for the collaboration of all of our amazing partners and program attendees.

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Experiential Outdoor Learning in Early Childhood

Visiting Guest Speaker Susan Humphries addresses a group of early childhood educators at our event in San Francisco, October 1, 2019.

On October 1st, Green Schoolyards America collaborated with San Francisco Children & Nature to create an event focused on experiential outdoor learning in early childhood. This special workshop was generously funded by our partners at First 5 San Francisco and the Low Income Investment Fund, and was produced in collaboration with San Francisco Recreation and Parks, San Francisco Office of Early Care and Education, San Francisco Unified School District, and Children’s Council San Francisco.

The workshop was held at the Cayuga Club House in San Francisco’s Cayuga Park. It began with a tour of the park and playground—one of San Francisco’s hidden gems with unique themed gardens and whimsical wood carvings created as a labor of love by local legend Demetrio Braceros. Braceros immigrated from the Philippines and is a retired long-time SF Recreation and Parks Gardener.

The workshop with Susan Humphries followed the park tour. It included a presentation and discussion session focused on her work at Coombes and her approach to experiential outdoor learning and play on school grounds. Her slideshow included a discussion of children’s social-emotional, mental, and physical health needs in early childhood, and the ways in which preschool and early care settings can develop their outdoor environments to become nature-filled oases that broaden play opportunities and bring curriculum outside. The presentation was followed by a lively discussion with the audience.

Scenes from the event are included below. Photographs by Maria Durana, SF Children & Nature.

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Green Schoolyards America’s Principals’ Institute

Susan Humphries leads Principals’ Institute Participants in a discussion and hands-on lesson during our seminar on October 2, 2019.

Green Schoolyards America hosts a year-long program for school principals and school district administrators that provides resources, advice, professional development, and a peer network that helps principals and school district leaders to adopt and sustain comprehensive, high quality, green schoolyard programs at their schools and in their districts. Our Principals’ Institute includes four one-day seminars and three schoolyard site visit days over the course of the year.

Susan Humphries joined us as our featured speaker for the third seminar of the Principals’ Institute, held on October 2nd at the office of Playworks in Oakland. We extend our heartfelt thanks to Playworks for generously offering us the use of their beautiful space.

Our October Principals’ Institute seminar focused on strategies for developing a nature-rich living schoolyard as a tool to engage students in learning across the curriculum—and as an organizing framework for a school’s overall program.

Ms. Humphries gave a keynote presentation to share her work and the educational philosophy she developed at Coombes. She spoke with the assembled group of school administrators as a peer-mentor, sharing her 50 years of experience in shaping her school’s program and leading the school’s faculty. After the presentation we had an engaging discussion with the school leaders and partners in the room, and focused on the ways that school principals and district administrators can shape the educational approach at their schools. Everyone also participated in a short hands-on activity that explored the properties of feathers, as shown below. (Click here to read more about Susan Humphries’s lessons about feathers.)

In the afternoon, Institute participants discussed their ongoing work to advance their school and districts’ green schoolyard program. Susan Humphries provided feedback on their ideas and offered suggestions for next steps.

Principals’ Institute participants tried one of Susan Humphries’s lessons about feathers—integrating natural materials with science concepts (air currents, biology, aerodynamics) and interpersonal skills (cooperation, communication). See pages 17-18 of our new free publication, Experiential outdoor learning in the schoolyard, mentioned below for a detailed description of this lesson and others developed by susan humphries.

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Green Schoolyards America worked with Susan Humphries to create a free online book entitled, Experiential Outdoor Learning in the Schoolyard.

Our new book includes detailed descriptions of the engaging experiential outdoor lessons Ms. Humphries modeled during our Principals’ Institute and at our conference in September.

Please visit our schoolyard activity webpage to download your own copy of this book and the other free schoolyard learning, play, and nature activities in our extended book set.

We hope our readers will try these outdoor activities with their own schools, and will share photos of their schoolyard adventures with us!

Learning Takes Flight in Green Schoolyards

Photo by Shirl Buss

Green Schoolyards America was honored to feature the work of our esteemed colleague, Susan Humphries, MBE, MA, at a two-day conference in the San Francisco Bay Area on September 27-28, 2019. Ms. Humphries traveled from England to share her expertise in teaching methods based on hands-on outdoor experiences and a deep understanding of both child development and the natural world. The conference included 12 hands-on workshops that explored Ms. Humphries educational philosophy and her amazingly creative, engaging curriculum ideas.

This article is the second in a series intended to share what we learned from Susan Humphries during her visit, and focuses on activities we explored that relate to birds and the magic of flight.

Properties of Feathers

Several workshops offered at the conference focused on the physical properties of feathers and the ways that they interact with the air to help birds fly. These hands-on curriculum lessons blended scientific investigation techniques with play and visual art in a manner designed to spark curiosity and hold students’ interest.

In one workshop, conference participants explored the structure of feathers by looking closely at a wide variety of small pin feathers, selected for their beautiful colors and patterns. Participants identified the central shaft (quill), parallel barbs, and smaller filaments (barbules) that “zip” together to create a flat, smooth surface on each feather, designed to catch the wind and help birds generate lift. They also deconstructed their feathers to understand more about them.

susan Humphries teaches the workshop

Participants examined many feathers

Feather detail showing barbs & barbules

Another workshop examined the ways that feathers move in the air by trying a series of activities with different types of feathers and feather-filled pillows. Participants experimented with casting small amounts of tiny feathers into the air to watch the breeze carry them. Then, they worked with a partner to see if they could direct a single (small) feather’s flight, using air currents they generated with their breath or their hands. Next, participants tried balancing long peacock feathers in the palm of their hand, compensating for the light breeze blowing across the playground—as shown in the video below.

The workshop participants also experimented with the ways that feather-filled pillows interact with the air, by tossing a pillow to one another as they stood in a circle. The feathers inside the pillow slow its speed as it travels, and the pillow makes a nearly silent landing when it is caught or dropped.

Participants tossed a feather pillow in the air to observe how the feathers contained inside helped to slow the object’s movement.

Experiential History

Susan Humphries’s educational philosophy includes an experiential approach to teaching history. Many of her lessons make history come alive for children using hands-on experiences with ordinary aspects of life that were more common in past centuries. Two of our workshops explored this idea through our theme of birds and flight—while also providing windows into “cutting edge communications technology” of the past.

In one workshop, participants learned traditional writing techniques using a turkey quill. Each person trimmed their own quill to have a suitable writing point and then used their new feather pen with red and black ink to practice drawing pictures and writing text. Indelible inks and feathers like these were used to write important documents such as the Magna Carta and everything else—from bills of sale, to laws, and letters—in past centuries.

Cutting a suitable writing point on a turkey feather quill

Using a turkey quill pen to practice writing, with red ink

Using a turkey quill pen to practice writing

Homing pigeons were also one of the fastest ways to send a message over long distances in the centuries before planes, trains, automobiles, telephones, and computers. When they traveled, people would bring pigeons from their coop at home with them on their journey, and then release them with tiny messages tied to their legs when they reached their destination or had another important idea to communicate with friends, family, and colleagues.

At the end of the first day of our conference, we were grateful to have pigeon expert Bill Milestone join us with a delightful flock of pigeons he raises at his home in San Francisco. After teaching us about his pigeons, conference attendees released them so that they could fly back home, across San Francisco Bay.

Releasing pigeons with children at their school presents a wide range of potential curriculum ties including:

• geography lessons, tracing the start and end points of the pigeons’ journey

• the history of communication technology

• flight aerodynamics

• biological homing mechanisms of birds

• animal husbandry and training techniques

Releasing pigeons also presents opportunities to teach empathy and spark wonder, while having an enjoyable experience in a very memorable way. The video below shares the magical moment of our pigeon release at the conference.

Pigeons and doves in art

As Susan Humphries tells us, "The affinity between people and birds goes back centuries and still resonates today. Pigeons and doves, in particular, appear in artwork across cultures around the world, in both secular and religious contexts.”

In our workshop activity on this theme, participants explored the ways that pigeons and doves have been represented in art, and then tried their hands at making their own artwork that included birds. During the workshop they drew large scale, colorful chalk pictures of birds on the schoolyard’s asphalt, and wove peace doves into the chainlink fence using strips of cloth.

Photos above by Shirl Buss and Green Schoolyards America

We hope that this interdisciplinary exploration of birds will inspire you to try some of these lessons at your own local school. Please send us photos to share your work!

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Detailed descriptions of each of the workshops described in this article are included in a free online book Green Schoolyards America created with Susan Humphries entitled, Experiential Outdoor Learning in the Schoolyard. Please visit our schoolyard activity webpage to download your own copy.

For detailed directions about how to implement the bird-related lessons described above, please see pages 6, 7, 10, and 17 of this new publication.

Explore the Art of Arcimboldo in Your Schoolyard

Conference participants work on creating a vegetable and herb masterpiece, inspired by Arcimboldo.

Green Schoolyards America was honored to feature the work of our esteemed colleague, Susan Humphries, MBE, MA, at a two-day conference in the San Francisco Bay Area on September 27-28, 2019. Ms. Humphries traveled from England to share her expertise in teaching methods that are based on hands-on outdoor experiences and a deep understanding of both child development and the natural world. The conference included 12 hands-on workshops that explored Ms. Humphries educational philosophy and her amazingly creative, engaging curriculum ideas.

This is one of the portraits created by conference participants during the workshop.

This article is the first in a series intended to share some of what we learned from Susan Humphries during her visit, and focuses on a special art lesson that is also connected to history, agriculture, and food.

We are grateful for Full Belly Farm’s generous donation of beautiful organic vegetables, fruits, and herbs used in our conference workshop and shown in the images below.

Create a Portrait Inspired by Arcimboldo

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1593) was an artist with a fascination for plants, and especially vegetable forms. He became a resident court painter for Emperor Maximillian at his court in Vienna, Austria and was given free rein to indulge his interests. The result was a set of ingenious masterpieces which were added to the royal collection. Many of Arcimboldo’s paintings were portraits rendered using the forms of vegetables, fruits, and other plants to convey their subject. Today, many of his works can be viewed at the National Art Gallery in Vienna and online. 

Conference participants select produce from the central display as they begin their vegetable portraits.

In our conference workshop, participants worked with a wide assortment of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and dried beans, that were generously donated by Full Belly Farm, and also purchased from local stores and gathered from our gardens. To begin, we spread a clean sheet on the mulch-covered school playground, and participants arranged the produce in an artful display. We gathered our workshop group around the display and reviewed all of the names of each item, passing some unfamiliar items around the circle so that they could be examined more closely. Next, we discussed Arcimboldo’s work and reviewed images of some of his most famous paintings to understand his artistic style. (Images of Arcimboldo’s work can be viewed on this website.)

Our goal for this workshop—which was limited by a 25 minute time frame—was to work in groups to create temporary vegetable portraits inspired by Arcimboldo’s style and process. Participants split into small groups of 2-4 people, and each began creating their vegetable portraits on their own sheet of cloth, on the ground. Before long, each group had created their own masterpiece!

We closed our session with a “gallery walk” to enjoy and discuss each group’s creations. After the gallery walk, participants photographed their work and then returned the produce to the central display where they made another artful arrangement for the next workshop group to use in the same way. If we had had more time, we could have also taken Arcimboldo’s approach one step farther, and painted pictures using the vegetable portraits as still life models for the finished painted works.

At the end of the day, the produce was still in excellent condition, having been handled very gently, and was given to the host school to cook in its kitchen, as Ms. Humphries always did with her own students when she was the principal of The Coombes School.

We hope you will try this lesson with students you work with, and that you will share your photos of your artistic adventures with us!

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A detailed description of the curriculum lesson described in this article is included in a free online book Green Schoolyards America created with Susan Humphries entitled, Experiential Outdoor Learning in the Schoolyard. Please visit our schoolyard activity webpage to download your own copy. You will find this lesson about Arcimboldo on page 9 of this publication.

Successful Conference: Experiential Learning in the Schoolyard

Conference attendees released homing pigeons at the end of the first day of the conference in a session led by Susan Humphries and pigeon expert Bill Milestone. Releasing pigeons presents a wide range of potential curriculum ties including: geography, the history of communication technology, flight aerodynamics, and biological homing mechanisms. It also presents opportunities to teach empathy and spark wonder, while having an enjoyable experience in a very memorable way.

Green Schoolyards America was honored to feature the work of our esteemed colleague, Susan Humphries, MBE, MA, at a two-day conference in the San Francisco Bay Area on September 27-28, 2019. Ms. Humphries traveled from England to share her expertise in how to use school grounds to foster children’s learning, play, and happiness. She brought a wealth of knowledge in teaching methods that are based on hands-on outdoor experiences and a deep understanding of both child development and the natural world.

The conference was held on the beautiful grounds of Golestan School in El Cerrito, California, which was an ideal venue for the 12 hands-on workshops over the course of the event. We extend a heartfelt thank you to Golestan School for warmly welcoming us and opening their grounds for this special event!

Susan Humphries shared her perspective and ideas with vibrant slideshows on each day of the event, and conference participants engaged in a lively discussion with her.

Learning from Coombes

Each morning, the conference began with a different keynote presentation by Ms. Humphries. She shared her experiences transforming the curriculum and grounds of The Coombes School in Berkshire, England, where she was the founding principal and led the school for almost 40 years. She explained that when she started her work at Coombes, the setting was very basic—just a wide open grassy field and a small patch of asphalt. Over the years, she and her students and their school community planted hundreds of trees on the 6 acre site, transforming it into a biologically rich woodland environment that offered endless opportunities for teachers to teach outside and for children to explore the natural world around them. The photographs below show this remarkable transformation.

views of the coombes school in 1971 and 1985 (above) show the change that occurred on school grounds over time, as Ms. Humphries, her students, and their school community planted hundreds of trees on the 6 acre site. Photos by Susan humphries.

Hands-on Workshops

After Ms. Humphries’s morning presentations, participants engaged in 6 hands-on outdoor workshops each day, related to the examples she gave during her slideshows. The workshops blended poetry, visual art, art display, and performance, with science, math, experiential history, and writing. Many of the activities emphasized hands-on investigation, observation skills, analysis, teamwork, and symbolism. Others highlighted the magic and wonder of the natural world, a sense of place, reflection, empathy, and peace.

The photographs below offer glimpses of the workshops in action. We will post additional blogs in the coming weeks that highlight the workshops in more detail.

New free publication

After the conference, Green Schoolyards America worked with Ms. Humphries to capture the essence of our hands-on workshops in written form. We are very pleased to be able to share a short new book of outdoor learning ideas, based on the conference’s workshops and Ms. Humphries’s work at Coombes. We hope that you—our readers—will try these activities with students at your own local schools.

Please click here to download your own free copy of this new publication entitled, Experiential Outdoor Learning in the Schoolyard. We also hope you will use these schoolyard curriculum ideas in conjunction with the additional schoolyard activities found in our companion publications available for free on the same webpage.

We greatly enjoyed Susan Humphries’s visit, and learned so much from her while she was here. We hope schools across the Bay Area (and beyond) will incorporate her educational philosophy and curriculum ideas into their own practice. As you try the outdoor learning ideas in this publication with your own students, please write to us to tell us about your schoolyard adventures.

Thank you, volunteers!

Green Schoolyards America would like to thank our wonderful, dedicated conference volunteers who helped to lead the workshops and ensured that the event ran smoothly! You are all amazing and greatly appreciated! Thank you again, Golestan School, for hosting the conference on your lovely school grounds. And thank you, Susan Humphries for coming to California to share your expertise and wisdom with us. We are grateful for our wonderful community of partners.

A heartfelt thank you to our wonderful Conference volunteErs and Collaborators! Left to right: Susan Humphries (visiting speaker), Mary Roscoe, Shari Wilson, Kim Walker, Richard Parker, Lisa Howard, Sharon danks (GSA Executive Director). Volunteers not pictured: Maryam Atai, Ayden Danks, Yalda Modabber, Wanda Stewart.

Announcing a Hands-on Conference with Inspiring School Ground Innovator, Susan Humphries: Sept. 27-28, 2019

An outdoor lesson in progress at The Coombes School, within a child-planted forest.
Photo: © Sharon Danks

Green Schoolyards America is honored to announce that we will have a very special visitor this fall, in town from England! Our colleague, Susan Humphries, MBE, MA, will join us in the San Francisco Bay Area at the end of September to share her expertise and deep understanding of how to use school grounds to foster children’s learning, play, and happiness.

Ms. Humphries will collaborate with Green Schoolyards America to lead a two-day, professional development conference that shares what she has learned over her 40+ year career as one of the green schoolyard field’s international founders. She brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise in teaching methods that are based on outdoor experiences and an understanding of the natural world.

Save the dates!

September 27 – 28, 2019

DAY 1: Hands-on Teaching and
Learning in a Green Schoolyard

DAY 2: Making the Most of
Asphalt-Covered School Grounds

Timing: 9:00 am - 3:30 pm, both days
Location: Hosted by Golestan School, El Cerrito, CA

Our conference program is designed for preschool and elementary school teachers, and will also be well suited to after school and childcare staff, educators in non-formal settings, garden teachers, designers of children’s environments, and members of the public interested in children’s wellbeing, learning, and play.

The program will include a keynote presentation each day with vibrant examples drawn from Ms. Humphries’s inspiring work at The Coombes School in Berkshire, England, where she was the Founding Headteacher (principal) and led the school for almost four decades. The program will also include hands-on workshops designed to bring her teaching philosophy and methodology to life, and provide resources and ideas that participants will be able to use at their own schools after the conference.

A music lesson in progress on the asphalt playground at The Coombes School.
Photo: © Sharon Danks

More information about the speaker:

Susan Humphries, MBE, MA, is the Founding Headteacher of The Coombes School in Berkshire, England. She led the school from 1971 to 2002, and remained involved with their program and landscape development for an additional decade after her retirement. In 2011, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Faculty of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden to acknowledge the foundations she has laid in building individual and group responsibility for healthy ecosystems and use of natural resources. In 2012, Humphries collaborated with her colleague Susan Rowe to write a book called The Coombes Approach: Learning through an Experimental and Outdoor Curriculum, to share teaching methods used at the school. In 2018, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International School Grounds Alliance to recognize the formative impact her ideas have had on the green schoolyard movement across the globe.

Enrollment:

This conference is open to the public. Click here for more detailed information about the event and how to enroll. We hope you will join us for this special event!

Conference organizers:

This conference is a project of Green Schoolyards America, in collaboration with Susan Humphries. It will be hosted by our partners at Golestan Education, on their beautiful school grounds in El Cerrito, CA.

Children, Nature, and School Grounds in Oakland, California

Conference participants visited the beautiful garden at Hoover Elementary School in Oakland, CA.

We had the pleasure of working with our colleagues to shine a spotlight on school grounds in Oakland during the Children & Nature Network’s 2019 International Children & Nature conference in May.

We participated in two conference sessions that explored Green Schoolyards America’s ongoing collaboration with the Oakland Unified School District and The Trust for Public Land to develop and help implement a vision for greening school grounds across Oakland.

On May 15, 2019, we helped the Children & Nature Network to lead a special pre-conference session focused on using green schoolyards as a mechanism to bring nature into children’s lives on a daily basis. Participants in this session came into town from across the United States and around the world, and are engaged in schoolyard greening efforts in their own local regions. We had a lively and productive group discussion and exchange of ideas in the morning.

Sharon Danks (Green Schoolyards America) talks about our collaborative work in Oakland.

Just before lunch, Green Schoolyards America, Trust for Public Land, and Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) gave a collaborative slide presentation about our work together, and our vision to green school grounds across the City.

After lunch, the whole group boarded buses and we had the opportunity to bring everyone to see three Oakland schools where greening is planned or underway.

Participants in the schoolyard tour visit Markham Elementary in Oakland, CA to learn about changes planned for the grounds.

On our visit to Markham Elementary, The Trust for Public Land showed the visiting group a schoolyard master plan that will help transform a very paved school site (above) into a more park-like green space with trees, gardens, and a variety of outdoor learning and recreational spaces. This school is one of the five pilot projects that our partnership is producing. The Trust for Public Land is leading the design process.

On our visit to Hoover Elementary, garden teacher Wanda Stewart shared the work she has been doing with her students, school volunteers, and the wider community to develop a spectacular garden and outdoor learning space on the school grounds. The program already in action at this school is a model for others in our region, and its benefits to students are already very clear. Several students joined the tour and told the visitors about what they appreciated about spending time in green space at their school. The students were also expert tour guides who led the adults through the garden and helped them to see it through their eyes.

Students at Hoover Elementary joined the discussion about their school garden, and helped the visiting adults learn about the program.

On May 16, the three partner organizations also spoke at a separate conference session about greening school grounds in Oakland. Sharon Danks (Green Schoolyards America), Alejandra Chiesa (Trust for Public Land), and OUSD School Board Vice President Jody London co-presented (shown below), and engaged the audience in a conversation about the tremendous need for this work, the challenges involved in trying to dramatically change school grounds, and the process and strategies we are using to bring green schoolyards to scale in Oakland.

The Trust for Public Land’s Alejandra Chiesa speaks to conference attendees.

OUSD School Board Vice President Jody London speaks at the conference.

Later in the day on May 16, Sharon Danks (Green Schoolyards America) also collaborated with colleagues John Fisher (Life Lab) and Nathan Larson (Wisconsin School Garden Network) to lead a separate session at the conference focused on the topic of developing and sustaining networks to further the school garden and green schoolyard movements. Our workshop shared examples from our own work, and promoted a lively dialogue about network-building among session participants.

Green Schoolyards America greatly enjoys sharing our work at conferences and meeting our colleagues. It is wonderful to hear about inspiring efforts happening all around us, near and far. We will close this post with a snapshot (below) of our green schoolyard colleagues who were in town from across the United States as well as England and Chile!

A lively gathering of green schoolyard colleagues from near and far—out for ice cream to continue our conversations after the conference!