Free Schoolyard Activity Guides

Green Schoolyards America and the International School Grounds Alliance collaborate to produce a set of free, digital schoolyard Activity Guides, designed to provide a wide range of outdoor activity ideas for schools that work with children between the ages of 3 and 18 years old. We hope our Activity Guides will encourage schools across the United States, and around the world, to take their students outside during the month of May—and throughout the year— to celebrate their grounds and use them to their fullest.

There are two collaboratively written books in the 2018 edition of this set, and they follow the same format. Each book includes dozens of activity ideas written by our colleagues at other organizations, and each is updated every year or two with additional ideas so the collection grows over time.

Green Schoolyards America’s Living Schoolyard Activity Guide – United States Edition now includes 131 ideas for year-round school ground activities, written by 122 organizations from across the United States.

The International School Grounds Month Activity Guide includes an additional 104 ideas for use outdoors in May, written by 73 organizations from 27 countries. It is published by the International School Grounds Alliance (ISGA) and was produced and edited by Green Schoolyards America in collaboration with our ISGA colleagues.

In December 2019, we created a short companion publication called Experiential Outdoor Learning in the Schoolyard, with 13 additional outdoor activities written by renowned educator, Susan Humphries.

All of the activities in these Guides cover a wide range of ideas that support learning across the curriculum, promote healthy lifestyles, and encourage play and exploration during children’s free time, before, during and after school. Many of the activities also focus on ways to help children and youth understand the places they live, and connect to their neighborhood’s unique natural, geographic, and cultural context.

We hope these ideas will inspire you and help you get started dreaming up outdoor activities for your own local school, wherever you live. All of the activities are intended for use anywhere in the world, so be sure to download all of the free books and share them with your friends and colleagues!

After you try the ideas in these books, please tell us about your schoolyard adventures. We look forward to hearing from you!

Click on the book covers
to download these free publications!

Read the Activity Guide in Chinese, Czech, and Spanish!

The international edition of the school ground Activity Guide is now available in Chinese, Czech, and Spanish! Click on the covers above to download each book.

Contributing Organizations

The Activity Guide set is the result of a fruitful collaboration between Green Schoolyards America, the International School Grounds Alliance and 186 other organizations around the world, who each contributed a school ground activity that reflects their own organization’s mission, programs and areas of expertise. The diversity of ideas they shared will now enrich school ground programs around the globe. We greatly appreciate everyone’s participation and extend our sincere and heartfelt thanks to this wonderful community of colleagues. 

The maps to the left and below show the fantastic geographic diversity of the author-organizations that contributed activity ideas to this publication series. Organizations that contributed to the Living Schoolyard Activity Guide are shown with yellow markers. Organizations that contributed to the International School Grounds Month Activity Guide are shown with red markers. This is truly a global movement!