Playgrounds, Gardens, & Outdoor Learning
We highly value the opportunities that our outdoor facilities provide to our students. The creative, healthy, and vigorous play our spaces invite encourages the development of the whole child, reinforcing and broadening possibilities in the science, environmental, and social-emotional realms.
The St. Patrick’s Garden & Outdoor Learning Space is one of the cornerstones of our program. Not only does it offer almost endless engaging - and popular! - learning opportunities, it is also central to ensuring our students understand their role as future stewards of the planet. Located on our Foxhall Campus, the 3,750-square-foot space was opening in the late summer of 2020.
It consists of nine garden beds and several outdoor covered classroom spaces. Students have the opportunity to use tools, learn about our food system, and watch plants grow throughout the year.
To help us plan our planting season and create the ideal learning environment, we partnered with a local gardening organization, Love & Carrots. Our first fall harvest in 2020 featured more than 30 crops - we grew everything from broccoli and dinosaur kale to cilantro and the ever-popular stevia.
St. Patrick’s faculty embed this garden space into the educational program to ensure that each student will have the opportunity to experience this dynamic addition to our curriculum. In addition to the garden, the Foxhall Campus has three archeological pits that support the Grade 5 Archeological Dig, a culmination of a year-long study of ancient civilizations.
As reflected in our Sustainability Mission Statement, we strive “to shape engaged citizens who live with integrity, empathy, and purpose, in part by involving our community in the stewardship of the planet.” To that end, and as current circumstances made clear the importance of outdoor learning spaces, St. Patrick’s began work on a new outdoor space—the St. Patrick’s Garden & Outdoor Learning Space. The 3,750-square-foot space, located on our Foxhall Campus, consists of nine garden beds and space for several outdoor classrooms. The Garden & Outdoor Learning Space was launched at the start of the 2020-2021 school year, providing students the opportunity to use tools, learn about our food system, and watch plants grow throughout the year. This innovative space was made possible thanks to donations from a group of generous environmentalists.
More than 200 individual volunteers of all ages have helped to set up the garden by moving compost and mulch, installing outdoor classrooms, weeding, planting living clover pathways, and harvesting vegetables and herbs. From broccoli and dinosaur kale to cilantro and the ever-popular stevia, our fall harvest consists of more than 30 crops. To help us plan our planting season and create the ideal learning environment, St. Patrick’s has partnered with a local gardening organization, Love & Carrots. Our faculty have been hard at work brainstorming and planning ways to embed this garden space into the educational program and ensure that it will be a dynamic addition to our curriculum.
The Role of Outdoor Play
EARLY CHILDHOOD
Early-childhood research clearly establishes that developmentally appropriate opportunities to play offer an exceptional vehicle to promote the social-emotional, cognitive, language, and self-regulation skills that build each child’s executive functions. Our playgrounds encourage students to play together or explore independently and to create new games alone or in collaboration with their peers. We know that play is a particularly effective and efficient way to develop three critical executive-function skills important to a child’s academic success, including working memory, impulsivity control, and cognitive flexibility. The Day School recognizes that importance and has been a leading proponent of intentional and guided play throughout its 63-year history. In other words, play is serious business here at St. Patrick’s and an excellent way for students to begin their journey of reflecting on who they are and what they can accomplish in the wider world. And our children begin this reflection and understanding of their relationship to the world around them by developing their own unique voice.
LOWER SCHOOL &
UPPER ELEMENTARY
Our Playgrounds are specifically designed to encourage children to engage in novel physical movement which, research shows, has a direct relationship to improving cognitive function. Our playground has also been designed to nurture each child’s inherent imagination. It particularly provides the children with unique spaces to use their voices by organizing their own games and participate in unstructured group activities that are less solitary. At St. Patrick’s, we know that time spent outdoors in a natural environment is calming, improves a child’s mood, and reduces stress. All in all, our children are physically, emotionally, and cognitively nourished from being active in outdoor and natural surroundings.
MIDDLE SCHOOL
Middle School students use our Foxhall Field, Gymnasium & Performance Center and Sports Deck for Athletics and PE. The regulation-sized Foxhall field on our 9.2 acre Foxhall Campus provides space for PE, soccer, and lacrosse as well as stadium seating 660. The Gymnasium is home to our PE program as well as JV and Varsity Basketball. In addition, each year, many grades conduct their culminating performance on the stage and the Grade 8 students perform in an end of year musical as well as visual arts night. Featuring a flat, hard, all-weather surface, the Sports Deck rose on a platform adjacent to the Whitehaven Campus Gymnasium & Performance Center and above what was an open-air parking pad. A significant expansion of our outdoor facilities, this 5,450-square-foot play surface exceeds the size of a standard basketball court.