New Outdoor Classroom offers hands on learning

The National STEM Academy at the Museum of aviation held a ribbon cutting ceremony for the new outdoor classroom on Monday. The classroom is said to run on renewable energy and will be used to facilitate STEM programs to students and teachers at the National STEM Academy. 

Melissa Spalding, Director of Education at the Museum of aviation says the classrooms allots the opportunity for students to learn more about renewable resources and energy conservation. “We’re teaching teachers and students to love and take care of our Earth,” Spalding said.

The new outdoor classroom features include solar panels, a wind turbine and a weather station. Spalding says the idea for the outdoor classroom stemmed from community feedback. The STEM academy staff asked students and teachers to pinpoint the subjects they wanted to know more about and the common response was the Earth and all its resources. “We have a lot of excellent math and science initiatives here at the museum,” Spalding said.but environmental education is a very important tool to always be threading through the different classes that we do.”

Spalding also says the classroom will give students an opportunity to learn about multiple sciences in a more fun and interactive way than they’re used to. “We do a lot of hands on math and science here and so when you’re doing something interactive like that, its not out of a textbook,” Spalding said. “You need to be able to get your hand dirty.” The process to build the classroom took three years because the staff wanted to ensure that the classroom would meet the strict criteria set by the community.

“We take planning very important so we did put a lot of effort in the beginning in what we wanted the end to look like,” Spalding said. The staff spoke with other schools to get feedback on what the students needed to learn along with researching the best methods of teaching students about different sciences. Spalding also says they looked at the state’s performance standards for curriculum as a guideline. “A lot of the time in preparing this outdoor classroom was put into what curriculum standards do we eventually wanna meet today,” Spalding said.

6th grader, Katie McFarland says she’s excited to learn how to recognize different things outside and she’s impressed with the outside classroom. “I think it’s a good opportunity for kids to go out and learn new things about nature,” McFarland said. “So far we’ve been learning about electricity and how to help the environment and pollution.”

The STEM academy offers classes to children from age four and up; students who cannot afford to enroll have the opportunity to receive scholarship opportunities. “Some of our donors give us money to be able to help students that are underserved be able to take the classes at no cost. So, when the schools have students that cannot pay for a program, we work with the schools to provide those scholarships,” Spalding said. Students can enroll for STEM classes through their school or online at musuemofaviatoin.org.