Garlough Environmental Magnet School: An Environmental Education Elementary School

              After learning about place based education and learning through experience, I was interested in finding out what a school based in this type of learning is like. After researching environmental elementary schools, one in particular stuck out to me. This school is called the Garlough Environmental Magnet School, and it is located in West St. Paul, MN. This school stuck out to me, particularly because it located across the street from a 320 acre Nature Center, called the Dodge Nature Center. The school uses this area regularly as an outdoor classroom, as a way to teach children about the environment.
           Another reason I found this school very interesting is that they focus a lot on hands on learning, and learning through experience, which is a big part of place based education. The school website lists that they study things such as "counting and sorting leaves, measuring rainfall, and restoring prairie grasslands." I think that this type of learning is great for producing environmentally aware children, which is very important for the future. These are the kind of people we will need in the future to think critically about issues in the world and having this awareness from such a young age will certainly help them to solve many problems in the future.
                     I also think this kind of education is important because it helps children feel connected to the world around them, which changes their concept of education. When they feel that what they are learning actually matters, and they know that it will make a difference in their future, then education becomes important to them. I believe that we need more schools that teach in this way, to help children get more involved in their own education.

http://www.garlough.isd197.org/about/OurSchool