Surrey Schools offering new outdoor elementary learning program
The Surrey School District is excited to offer a full-time Elementary Outdoor Land-Based Learning Program at Hall’s Prairie Elementary (18035 8th Ave., Surrey, BC) beginning in 2024-2025.
Through daily outdoor land-based learning experiences, children will have the opportunity to develop the competencies, skills, and understandings outlined in the B.C. K-7 curriculum. Children will learn to be stewards of the land within which they live, and that encompasses Coast Salish Peoples, culture, language, and history.
The Outdoor Land-Based Learning Program will:
- Provide daily outdoor experiences that integrate B.C.'s curriculum with children's innate wonderings and curiosity.
- Allow teachers to facilitate emergent, experiential, inquiry-based, play-based, and place-based learning.
- Align with the First Peoples Principles of Learning and integrate Coast Salish culture, traditions, and history throughout the curriculum.
- Be rooted in Indigenous Coast Salish culture and traditions as stewards of the land.
- Allow teachers to help children to identify, co-manage and navigate risk as an integral part of learning and healthy development.
- Develop students' core competencies by providing experiential learning in the outdoors, fostering children's competencies as creative and critical thinkers, effective communicators, and people who are personally, socially and environmentally aware.
- Provide the opportunity for children to learn in a small school setting.
Registration
At this time, the district is surveying families to gauge interest for this program. If there is sufficient interest, registration will open in January 2024 for the program beginning in September 2024. The program would be for children in kindergarten to Grade 3, or even up to Grades 4, 5, 6, or 7.
If you are interested in this program, please click on the survey link here. The survey launches on November 29 and closes at 11:59 p.m. on December 10, 2023.
Please note: This is only a survey to gauge interest, and we are not registering students at this time or asking families to make a commitment. For more information about this program, please email comm-office@surreyschools.ca.
