75+ Outdoor Activities & Classroom Ideas to Help Your Kids Learn

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What to learn dozens of outdoor classroom ideas? This post includes 75 fun and intriguing Montessori-inspired Outdoor activities for kids.

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Dr. Montessori believed that the outdoors is a natural extension of the classroom and that there should be harmony between indoor and outdoor learning environments. The outdoors is the ideal sensorial experience.

What is So Important about Outdoor Education?

A child discovers the world through his senses in the most holistic way. Beyond the organic development through seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling, and, yes, I am going to write it, tasting in the great outdoors, nature brings ripe lessons in botany, zoology, and STEM in the most basic, pure ways.

Anne Botsford Comstock, the author of one of my favorite books, Handbook of Nature Study, emphasized observation as the foundation of outdoor education:

Ideas for the Outdoor Classroom

Key Tenets of Montessori Outdoor Education

So, what are the key tenets of a Montessori outdoor education? The same as the key tenets of the indoor classroom! A few key tenets that come to my mind include:

Child-Led
Well Prepared Environment
Teacher as Guide
Liberty within wide parameters
Intrinsic Motivation
Observe the Child

“A child, than anyone else, is a spontaneous observer of nature.” ~ Dr. Montessori

Montessori Outdoor Classroom Ideas

Practical Life Outdoor Classroom Ideas

Water play
Sand play
Transferring objects
Peeling
Weeding
Weaving
Pouring
Care of plants
Care of animals
Walking the line
Silence game
Yoga

Sensorial Outdoor Classroom Ideas

Patterns in nature with rocks and leaves
Stacking
Make a variation of the red rods with sticks
Make a variation of the pink tower with rocks
Go on a Geometric Solids Hunt
Identifying Smells
Listening Walk
Texture Hunt
Match Textures
Color Hunt
Shape Hunt
2D and 3D Shape Hunt
Series of “Isolation of Quality” Observations with a blindfold, earplugs, nose plug, etc.

Language Outdoor Classroom Ideas

Have a conversation while on a nature walk
Storytelling from a group of items
Choose a tree, tell its story
Go on a noun/verb/adjective/preposition hunt
Grain of sand sequencing
Texture hunt
Letter creation challenge with sticks
Proposition work with bodies or objects
Trace letters in the dirt
Go on a sound hunt
“Just one thing” activity
Command Games using Chalk (e.g., write “hop” and have the child “hop”)
Parts of speech game (e.g., when I say a noun, hop on one foot. when I say an adjective, sit down.”)