The David Heath Outdoor Education Center (named after our founder and first head of school), is a favorite campus location for students and staff alike. A combination outdoor classroom, organic food garden, flower garden, butterfly garden, weather center and native wildlife habitat, the Outdoor Education Center (OEC) provides a wealth of opportunities for education and recreation: digging weeds, picking berries, painting, writing poetry, or dangling your feet in the pond.

Have you ever thought about how much math is needed when a group of students measure a garden plot to determine the appropriate amount and placement of seeds, and the size of the wooden boards that now surround the planting beds? Have you ever tried to calculate how fast our box turtle is moving if it takes her 30 minutes to crawl 100 feet from her shelter to the pond? What about the scientific method that is applied when a group of children devise an experiment to determine the best materials in which to propagate plants?

Teachers cannot recreate a deep sea canyon on the school grounds, or a galaxy, or the massive geological forces which shape the earth, but a school garden is a living lab where students can dive right into the basic biological processes that sustain life. Traditionally, teachers relied on dioramas, mobiles, videos and field trips to aquariums or planetariums to bring their curriculums to life. But now, at MP&MS, just outside their classroom windows, teachers have a place for students to study first-hand the life cycle of plants, the process of natural decomposition, the water cycle, or the effect of insects, bacteria, weather and pollutants on the soil and the environment. At MP&MS, the Outdoor Education Center has become the place where abstract ideas and problems, formerly studied in textbooks and solved on blackboards, are brought to life and made meaningful.