It is hard to get my mind wrapped around planning for spring while 12” of snow is falling in blizzard like conditions outside my window, but we know that the light is increasing, sap is running, and the intrepid skunk cabbage is starting to work its way up through the still frozen ground, beginning to melt the snow around it.
20 years ago I read a study about how children spend on average 4-7 minutes outside a day. That, along with books like “Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv inspired me and many of us to find ways to get our students learning outside to do what we can to connect them to their local environment. I don’t imagine that the time our youth are getting outside has increased in the past two decades, as screen time has soared up to an average of 7 hours a day.
The Schoolyard Ecology program at Harvard Forest has played a key role for many of us in giving us practical tools to have our students learning outside. At this point in time, I cannot imagine a more critical or important step that we can take for the future well being of our youth.
All of this is to say, don’t give up! As we prepare for spring lessons, let’s continue to learn from each other to find ways to helps students who feel uncomfortable outside get comfortable and help change the hearts and minds of leadership who may still not understand that being outside is real learning.
Come to our spring workshop, and our monthly zoom calls! Bring your colleagues and help grow and strengthen our network!
Thank you for doing what you are doing—you inspire and fill me with hope every time you reach out and share stories or pictures of your schoolyard projects-please consider having your students submit their schoolyard stories to our NEW Journal of Schoolyard Ecology this spring!
Have fun out there!
Katharine
PS-Buds teachers—this is the time to make a plan for cutting branches and bringing them inside to force the buds to swell. It will probably take a couple of weeks, so consider doing this by mid-March. Simply trim branches from your study trees (not your study branches!) and put them in water inside. This will allow the students to observe the buds swelling before getting outside. You can even be fancy and turn it into an experiment if you like-try different temperature waters or different sun exposure and see which buds burst first!
Come one, come all Schoolyard Educators! We may be in the coldest portion of the winter, but it is time to think spring!
This Spring, we will be focusing on your successes! You will have a chance to share out about what you and your students have been up to this year and any results you would like to share.
Buds, Leaves, and Global Warming educators will learn the spring protocol from Dr. O’Keefe, and other educators will be able to opt into some choices including an experimental walk in the woods and discussions on other relevant topics.
We will also be celebrating our educators who have been contributing data for 5, 10, and even 15 years!
PDP’s available
What: Spring Workshop for Schoolyard Ecology
When: Tuesday, March 31st 9 am-3:30 pm
Where: Fisher Museum, Harvard Forest, Petersham, MA
Who: You!
Call for Submissions—Journal of Schoolyard Ecology
We wanted to reach out with another call for submissions to the First Harvard Forest Journal of Schoolyard Ecology! We are really excited about this journal because it gives students an opportunity to engage across schools, and it gives them an authentic, outside-of-their-own-classroom audience. It also gives us the chance to get to know each other and each other’s work. These don’t have to be complicated reports! Submissions can be a single page, and we aren’t rejecting submissions.
We have a few resources we wanted to share with you. First, here is the Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s student journal, which inspired this project. Second, here are our submission guidelines and rubric.
We also wanted to expand the submission types to include a Schoolyard Profile. This could be pictures of your schoolyard, the pin of your classroom on a map, descriptions of who you are and what you’re learning – anything you want to tell the Schoolyard Ecology community! If you have a submission idea, we’re open to that too!
Lastly, we updated the timeline to make it a shorter project and less demanding for your classrooms. Most importantly, it gives more time before the first draft is due.
New timeline:
April 6: Submission deadline for 1st drafts of scientific reports, literature reviews, or data visualizations. They can be submitted here. We’ll then send all drafts to our high school and graduate student peer review boards. They’ll offer feedback on your students’ work and ideas on how they can revise.
April 27: We’ll return edited scientific reports, literature reviews, and data visualizations to classrooms.
May 18: Submission deadline for art projects, schoolyard profiles, and final drafts of scientific reports, literature reviews, and data visualizations. We’ll use the same form for submissions.
Spring Zoom Calls
Wednesday, March 4th: 3:30-4:30 pm discussion of How to Love a Forest by Ethan Tapper-come even if you haven’t read it. You can always listen to an interview.
Wednesday, April 1st: 3:30-4:30 pm Come here about current research at Harvard Forest
Wednesday, May 6th, 2026: 3:30-4:30 pm Spring Share Outs
Educator Spotlight
Meet Mike Keough! Mike has been a teacher for 13 years and he teaches 8th grade at Sutton Middle School in Sutton, Massachusetts, just south of Worcester. While this is his 2nd year formally with Harvard Forest, he has been collecting phenological data of the trees at his school with his students for a remarkable 8 years! A cool component of the study at Sutton is that even though the trees were planted at the same time and are the same species from the same nursery, they show very different patterns in the color change and growth season. Some of the trees that are only 25 feet apart change color and drop their leaves several weeks apart! Such a great question to have the students grapple with. Mike and I are on the same wavelength as we both value the movement and time spent outside that participating in Schoolyard affords. As he aptly put it, “I think a lot of the mental health problems affecting society today are rooted in our detachment from the natural world.” I couldn’t agree more Mike, thank you for all you do and here is to another season getting outside!
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