Program
Outdoor Education Programs
Meaningful, curriculum-aligned outdoor education, designed with your school — without adding another burden to busy teachers. Curriculum comes alive outside.
What
Curriculum comes alive outside
Grow WILDE helps schools deliver meaningful, curriculum-aligned outdoor education without adding another complicated burden to already busy teachers and administrators.
Our programs take students beyond the classroom and into forests, fields, trails, farms, shorelines, schoolyards, and local natural spaces, where academic learning becomes physical, memorable, collaborative, and real.
This is not a generic field trip. Each Grow WILDE program is designed with your school to support specific grade levels, provincial or territorial curriculum expectations, student needs, seasonal opportunities, and logistical realities. Students investigate science in the field, use mathematics through mapping and navigation, develop language through storytelling and reflection, explore geography and social studies through land-based inquiry, and build confidence, resilience, leadership, and care for the natural world.
We make outdoor learning feel purposeful, safe, manageable, and deeply connected to school life.
Vision
What students experience
A Grow WILDE program asks students to do more than listen.
They observe, ask questions, move, build, test, reflect, collaborate, lead, adapt, and notice the living world around them. They learn through direct experience, guided inquiry, meaningful challenge, and structured reflection.
A class might study ecosystems by conducting field observations, explore measurement through trail design, write place-based reflections after a solo sit spot, investigate soil and food systems through regenerative farming, or practise leadership through an outdoor challenge that requires communication, judgment, and trust.
The result is learning that students remember because they lived it.
Purpose
Curriculum, taught through the land
Every program is designed around curricular purpose.
Your province or territory's curriculum provides the academic frame. The land provides the context. The experience gives students a reason to care.
Grow WILDE programs can support learning in science, geography, environmental studies, health and physical education, language, mathematics, the arts, social studies, leadership, Indigenous learning, sustainability, and interdisciplinary inquiry.
For secondary schools, programs can also be designed to support credit expectations, field study requirements, experiential learning goals, leadership development, and alternative approaches to student engagement, depending on the requirements of your province or territory.
We begin with your school's goals, then design the outdoor experience around them.
Plan
The Permacognitive Cycle
Grow WILDE programs are grounded in the Permacognitive Cycle: Observe. Design. Implement. Adapt.
This gives outdoor learning a clear structure. Students begin by observing the world carefully. They notice patterns, relationships, problems, possibilities, and their own responses. They then design a way forward, test ideas through action, and adapt based on what they learn.
This cycle helps students become more than passive learners. They become thinkers, makers, collaborators, stewards, and reflective decision-makers.
It also gives teachers a practical framework for connecting outdoor experiences to curriculum, assessment, reflection, and student growth.
Program options
Flexible by design
Every school is different, so Grow WILDE programs are flexible by design.
A single-day or half-day experience connected to a specific grade, subject, theme, or school goal. These are ideal for schools that want a meaningful entry point into outdoor education.
A single-day or half-day experience connected to a specific grade, subject, theme, or school goal. These are ideal for schools that want a meaningful entry point into outdoor education.
Outcomes
What schools gain
A strong outdoor education program does more than give students a good day outside.
Academic engagement
Students see why learning matters because they use it in real contexts.
Student well-being
Time outdoors supports attention, confidence, regulation, movement, and connection.
Leadership and collaboration
Students practise communication, responsibility, problem-solving, and care for one another.
Environmental literacy
Students develop a lived understanding of ecology, sustainability, and stewardship.
Teacher confidence
Educators gain models, language, and practical strategies for teaching outdoors.
School culture
Outdoor learning becomes part of who the school is, not just something it occasionally does.
For school teams
Planned for real school life
Outdoor education only works for schools when it is well planned. Grow WILDE works with school teams to make every piece clear — so administrators and teachers understand the purpose of the day, what students will be doing, and how it connects back to the classroom.
Programs are designed to stretch students without overwhelming them, with student safety, age-appropriate challenge, and inclusive participation in mind. Our goal is not to create extra work for schools. It is to make outdoor learning easier to deliver, easier to justify, and easier to repeat.
- Supervision, student readiness, and clear teacher roles
- Risk, weather, and emergency procedures
- Accessibility and inclusive participation
- Transportation, timing, and group size
- Curriculum fit and clear learning goals
- Parent communication, before and after the program day
Getting started
How the process works
We start with a conversation. First, we learn about your school, your students, your goals, and your constraints. Then we identify the best program format, site, grade level, curriculum connections, timing, and level of support. From there, Grow WILDE develops a clear program plan so your team knows what to expect before, during, and after the experience.
A typical partnership includes:
An initial planning conversation
Program design connected to grade level and curriculum goals
Alignment with your province or territory's curriculum expectations
A clear schedule, site plan, and student experience outline
Coordination around safety, supervision, weather, and logistics
Program delivery by Grow WILDE facilitators in partnership with school staff
Optional follow-up activities, reflection tools, and teacher support
The experience should feel alive for students and manageable for staff.
Why now
Why it matters now
Students are growing up in a world that asks more of them than memorization alone. They need attention, resilience, judgment, creativity, ecological awareness, physical confidence, communication skills, and a sense that their learning connects to something real.
Outdoor education helps build those capacities. It gives students a place to practise being fully awake: to notice, question, move, care, lead, fail safely, try again, and understand themselves as part of a larger living world.
For schools, this is not an extra. It is one of the most practical ways to make learning deeper, healthier, and more human.
Get involved
Ways to support Outdoor Education Programs
Schools and educators
Host a program at your site or co-design seasonal outdoor learning units with our team.
Host a programFunders and donors
Support subsidies that make outdoor programs accessible to schools in under-resourced communities.
Support accessVolunteers and community partners
Contribute expertise in Indigenous knowledge, science, arts, or farming as a program mentor.
Get involved