LEARN

Besides a playground, the Kelly School site can offer opportunities for outside and hands-on LEARNING. Too often urban neighborhoods become closed off from the natural world and the abundance of outside opportunities for learning how our world works. Research shows this creates a very unnatural way for students to learn. Let’s get outside!

While there is little to be learned from an asphalt schoolyard, Kelly Green is creating spaces that restore natural environments right in our midst and, when completed, can offer many more.

The school’s successful “pocket meadow”, planted with the help of Kelly Students in June of 2016, can serve primarily as a place of OBSERVATION: the changing seasons, from the Autumn fading native plant colors to the abundance of seeds these plants produce, the wildlife that comes to enjoy them, the winter “sleep” and the Spring “waking up” periods. It also serves as a base of RESEARCH, DISCOVERY and DOCUMENTATION, utilizing our new weather station, wildlife monitoring camera and large-scale magnifier.

Along with the garden, the meadow is a welcome respite from the hard surfaces which usually surround out schools. It is an opportunity to walk into a small, but quieter place to listen for birds, bees and butterflies, and help all of us re-learn our connection to the natural world, even while here in the city.

We look forward to creating more opportunities as we win support for rebuilding more of the schoolyard.