Parents, educators push for outdoor learning experiments to address COVID fears
The ongoing pandemic has put masks and sanitizers on back-to-school shopping lists, but several parents, teachers and school staff are hunting for even more unusual materials: cut logs for the schoolyard, tarps to shield soccer pitches from sun and rain, and cheap yoga mats for outdoor seating. With many school plans failing to promise smaller class sizes and epidemiologists noting less infection risk outdoors, an ardent movement of teachers, parents and sympathetic principals are urgently pursuing ambitious outdoor learning plans they hope can be incorporated into the curriculum.