The Portland Outdoor Explorers are excited to be introducing our new curriculum for the 2024-2025 school year. While our program is and shall remain child-led, we will be introducing themed days to focus on specific aspects of learning, playing, and growing, and allowing our students to find their own ways to enjoy each lesson.

Mondays – Artificer Day
This day focuses on arts and crafts, and wildcraft projects. These projects and lessons all allow us to express ourselves through the creative process while growing our fine motor control skills and learning that art can look like just about anything and everything.

Tuesdays – Bard Day
This day focuses on games and projects that help us grow our social and emotional skills, and sometimes even our rhythm and listening ears. These can look like listen and response games, a session of D&D, storry-telling, music, and dramatic play where children learn to express themselves, understand different perspectives, and build crucial social skills like cooperation, sharing, and problem-solving.

Wednesdays – Druid Day
Druids in D&D share an intimate connection with nature, which is something we like to foster in our students as well. Druid days focus on plant-based games such as scavenger hunts, plant-based trivia games, lessons on plant dyes, and more!

Thursdays – Fighter Days
Everybody needs a brain break now and again, and our foam sword battles allow us the opportunity to do just that. They also give our students a chance to build gross motor control, hand-eye coordination, and sportsmanship (but don’t tell them that).

Fridays – Ranger Days
Ranger days are all about stewardship, hiking, and stealth games like Eagle Eye and Firekeeper. Some days we’ll learn about trail signs, other days we’ll learn about how to make a firebreak and create a pretend fire using real techniques, and still other days we’ll learn about animals, knots, shelter-building, and all the kinds of things you’d expect from Park Rangers as well as D&D Rangers.

At the end of each week, we’ll make a list of activities and learning opportunities for each category, and roll an eight-sided die (a d8) to help us determine what activity we’ll be preparing for during the coming week. Student input will, of course, always be welcome!

While we are looking to provide daily focused activities for the kids that want to do so, we will continue to provide sports equipment and everything else the kids have come to enjoy. 

These are only a few examples of the things we’ll be able to teach and learn with our students in the coming school year. We hope your students will be as excited to join us as we are to be here!