Your students and their families are no doubt already thinking about “what’s next” after high school. And it’s no wonder — those four years go by quickly and students have a lot to learn on their way to becoming young adults at the end of it all. Help prepare them for the real world by booking a school trip to Muskoka Woods where the outdoor education they’ll receive helps build important life skills.
What is outdoor education?
Outdoor education is a form of experiential learning that takes place in natural settings, the primary goal of which is to provide students with opportunities to develop a range of skills, including environmental awareness, personal and social skills, that can be applied both in the classroom and out in the world.
Muskoka Woods’ spectacular setting in 1,100 acres on the shore of Lake Rosseau is the perfect spot for your students to take their learning outside. With programming for schools and groups that includes everything from a giant ropes course to nature hikes, campfires, and seasonal activities like snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, and snow tubing, your students will have a blast while honing important life skills.
How outdoor education prepares students for the real world
Outdoor learning helps prepare your students for the future in so many ways:
It develops essential collaboration skills: Spending time outside often involves team-building activities and working with a group, which fosters invaluable communication skills that can’t be taught from a textbook! Effective teamwork and collaboration skills will be part of every student’s future career. In fact, Jas Hundal, a guest on Muskoka Woods’ Shaping Our World podcast, explains that learning to work with others is so important that collaboration is one of the three future-ready skills that the program at Future-Ready Minds — an organization that exists to help kids achieve their highest potential in our fast-paced world — is built upon.
It provides experiential learning: We’ve talked about the importance of experiential learning before because it is such a meaningful education experience. When learning outside of the classroom students have direct interaction with the world around them, which fosters a deeper understanding of concepts and even promotes knowledge retention. For example, students who visited an art gallery could recall the social and historical details surrounding a painting they had seen quite easily when asked about them after the fact, which led researchers to believe that studying the actual art object was an effective tool for relaying academic information.
It helps them become responsible, conscious adults: Outdoor education develops environmental awareness and stewardship. By spending time in nature, students gain firsthand experiences of ecosystems, biodiversity, and sustainability. They develop a connection to the natural world and gain a sense of responsibility toward its preservation.
It promotes healthy habits now and into the future: Being outdoors and engaging in physical activity not only promotes physical fitness but spending time in nature has been shown to reduce stress, improve mood, and even enhance cognitive function. By taking students to Muskoka Woods, they’ll be able to experience those benefits firsthand, while also having fun, which creates an important correlation and makes them more likely to build outdoor time into their lives on their own.
It builds resilience: An important tool for students to have under their belt is resilience so that they can adapt and thrive no matter what the real word has in store for them — because we all know life doesn’t always go as planned! Outdoor education, and specifically those activities that encourage students to take risks and that emphasize process over perfection (hello, ropes course!), build resilience. Outdoor education also encourages students to master new skills, form deeper social bonds, and develop stronger communication skills, all of which build self-confident and resilient young adults.
It supports interdisciplinary learning: Outdoor education inherently supports interdisciplinary learning whereby students can explore connections between science, art, and history, for instance, developing a more comprehensive understanding of the world. Practically speaking, outdoor learning helps students build a skillset that will ensure that they can effectively tackle complexity and change throughout their careers.
It teaches practical skills: In nature, students learn survival skills, navigation techniques, problem-solving strategies, and environmental conservation practices, which have broader applications in everyday life.
It enhances creativity and critical thinking: nature stimulates thinking outside the box by encouraging students to observe, analyze, and make connections, which promotes innovative thinking and problem-solving — all important skills to have as they begin to navigate higher education and adulthood!
Outdoor education is a holistic approach to learning that aims to foster a sense of responsibility, environmental stewardship, collaboration skills, and resilience among other things, that can be applied both in and out of the classroom and into the future as they make their way in the real world.
To help your students harness the benefits of outdoor education in readying them for the real world, start planning your school trip to Muskoka Woods by getting in touch with us! Visit schools.muskokawoods.com for more information or to book your next Schools and Groups visit.
