What does it look like when a child moves from observing the world to actually shaping it?
Five years ago, my daughter joined Redwood Raven School (RRS), AWI’s nature-based elementary program, when it was just beginning. We were stepping into something new alongside a handful of other families, and we were stepping out of a pandemic. After months of isolation, being outdoors felt essential. That was a significant part of the draw: fresh air, open space, and the simple relief of children being together in nature again.
What we did not fully anticipate was how many more benefits would follow. A recent review from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, published in Frontiers in Psychology, examined 123 studies on children and greenspace and found that time in natural environments produced measurable improvements in anxiety, behavior, and even cognitive skills like reading and math. What families sensed instinctively after the pandemic, researchers had been documenting for years. The outdoor setting turned out to be just the beginning of something much deeper.
There was excitement, curiosity, and perhaps a little uncertainty as we wondered what this journey might become. Now, five years later, she is the first student to complete the full Redwood Raven School journey from beginning to end. And as I have reflected on that, I have realized that what I was watching all along was not only my daughter growing. I was watching children move from observing the world around them to shaping it.
Beneath the shade of a living classroom, students gather to explore ideas, ask questions, and build lasting connections with nature, one another, and the world around them. PC: A. Dawood
Learning to Notice
When RRS first began, much of the learning centered around noticing. Children learned to observe carefully: patterns in nature, changing seasons, insects, habitats, and relationships between living things. They learned to slow down and ask questions:
Why is that plant growing there?
Why does water move this way?
Why do some places feel different than others?
This kind of deliberate, unhurried observation turns out to be foundational. Royal Society-supported research on outdoor biodiversity education found that hands-on learning in natural environments is essential for developing curiosity and critical thinking, and that without it, students often struggle to form their own ideas or solve real problems.
This was not something that happened suddenly. Looking back, the movement from observing to acting had been unfolding gradually across all five years: each year building on the last, the experiences growing richer, the curriculum more layered, the children more capable of doing something with what they were learning. What I noticed as we reached this milestone was not a shift so much as a realization: how far RRS had come, and how much it had quietly become something extraordinary.
A Year of Culmination
This most recent year, my daughter’s last, felt in many ways like a culmination. The learning stretched far beyond traditional boundaries. Students visited the Mt. SAC Wildlife Sanctuary, the tidepools at Newport Beach, the Tongva village at the Mt. Baldy Visitor Center, the San Gabriel Mission, and Lopez Urban Farm. Each place offered something different: ecosystems close to home, life adapting in changing environments, deep connections between people and place, layers of California history.
What connected all of these experiences was what students carried back with them. They did not return and simply move on. They returned and began creating.
Returning to the same campus each week allows students to observe growth over time, from the gardens they help cultivate to the ecosystems they help steward. PC: H. Museitef
A Place to Return To
One of the things that makes Redwood Raven School unique within the Art and Wilderness Institute (the nature-based learning network RRS is part of) is that it has a permanent campus. While many educational experiences happen in temporary spaces, students here return to the same landscape week after week, year after year.
That matters more than it might seem.
Researchers at the Royal Society studying outdoor education found that when students return to the same natural sites repeatedly, it helps them build practical skills, reflect on what they are observing, and begin noticing change over time, and more importantly, it encourages children to develop a genuine connection with the world around them.
Children can see progression. They can return to places they helped shape and witness change over time. A pathway dug into a hillside remains there. Plants become established. Trees grow taller. A butterfly garden becomes active. Systems that once existed only as ideas slowly become part of the landscape itself.
There is something powerful about a child being able to point somewhere and say, I helped build that. Or, I planted that.
The campus itself almost becomes another teacher.
Under Ms. Amy’s guidance, a certified permaculturist and environmental educator who has been with RRS since the very beginning, students were not simply planting seeds or digging holes. Across five years, they learned to understand systems and relationships. They built swales along contour lines to slow and direct water. They created pathways that worked with the land rather than against it. They planted sugar cane, fig trees, rosemary, native plants, and butterfly habitats while thinking carefully about placement and purpose. They built compost systems and worm habitats. They created mulch pits that slowly nourished nearby trees.
And the learning started showing up in unexpected ways. Compost piles became commonplace and a part of everyday vocabulary. Students wanted to do litter patrol on their own. They began seeing landscapes not as static places, but as systems they could understand, care for, and improve.
Students cross a bridge at the Mt. SAC Wildlife Sanctuary, where careful observation of local ecosystems laid the foundation for the stewardship and environmental learning they would later put into practice back on campus. PC: M. Baltazar
Everything in Conversation
This same arc, moving from receiving to creating, from observing to shaping, was running through the joint classes as well.
In Ms. Hind’s classes, students explored California history and discovered how stories, culture, and traditions shape the world around us. Through Palestinian tatreez (embroidery), students experienced handwork not simply as decoration, but as history, identity, and storytelling: another way that human beings have always shaped culture and passed it forward. Together, students and teachers also harvested mallow growing right on the RRS campus to make khubeza, a traditional Palestinian dish, a reminder that land and culture are never really separate, and that the stories of people and place echo across time and across the world.
That same thread continued when students learned about how indigenous Californians used corn to make atole (masa-based beverage), and then walked into Ms. Mariam’s science of cooking class and made it themselves. In both cases, food was never just food. It was history, memory, and a way of understanding what it means to belong to a place.
What stood out across all of it was how naturally the learning wove together. A plant growing on campus became a cultural lesson. A cultural lesson became a cooking lesson. A cooking lesson became a science lesson. Nothing felt separate. Everything was in conversation.
A Program That Grows Alongside Its Students
As I reflect on the past five years, I also realize I have not only watched children grow; I have watched the program itself continue to grow and deepen each year.
This year, Ms. Mariam was recognized as Redwood Raven of the Year for her passion and excellence in teaching and for bringing learning to life in ways that inspire students. Ms. Hind received Emerald Owl of the Year for the wisdom, grace, and kindness she brings to the community and to her students. And Ms. Amy, who has been an anchor for this program since year one, continues bringing her expertise as a certified permaculturist and environmental educator into the experiences students have each week. Having someone who has been present from the very beginning, who knows this land and these students across years, is something families feel even when they cannot quite name it.
Year after year, the learning has become richer, the experiences more interconnected, and the sense of community stronger.
Shaping the World
They are learning that they can participate in it.
They can care for a place.
They can improve a place.
They can help shape a place.
Small acts of care, repeated over time, can transform a landscape, a community, and perhaps even ourselves. My daughter’s five-year journey showed me that. And it is a journey that is still open for families who are just beginning to wonder, as we once did, what this might become.
Want to see Redwood Raven’s living classroom in action? Take a tour with Ms. Amy.