Empower Youth to Grow Outdoors!

This fall, our Earth Protectors ventured into Baltimore’s largest forest to learn how life is connected and how to care for the places that sustain it.

In 2025, Baltimore’s parks became places of learning, inquiry, and connection for hundreds of young students. During the fall season at Gwynns Falls–Leakin Park, home to the nation’s second-largest urban woodland, elementary students explored forests and streams, asked questions, tested ideas, and navigated outdoor spaces with growing confidence.

They discovered common patterns in leaves, water, and their own bodies, noticing veins, branching shapes, and repeating forms found throughout nature.

They tested stream health, interpreted weather data using real scientific tools, and learned how scientists use living clues to understand water quality.

They moved carefully through habitats and practiced small but meaningful acts of stewardship along the way.

On InDiGO field trips, students explore how living things depend on one another and how human choices influence the balance of nature by learning through games, stories, songs, and close observation.

Each step on the trail invites students to slow down, pay close attention, and ask questions about where they are. An empty chrysalis serves as a quiet reminder that change often happens out of sight, leaving signs for those who have learned to look carefully.

Earlier in the year, students visited Druid Hill Park during the spring season, building familiarity with one of Baltimore’s most historic and well-loved green spaces. Taken together, these experiences across seasons gave students repeated opportunities to learn outdoors and develop a deeper sense of belonging in Baltimore’s parks.

This work is grounded in the Baltimore Children’s Outdoor Bill of Rights (COBOR). InDiGO designs and leads the educational experiences, working closely with classroom teachers and school partners.

Making this learning possible on the ground depends on sustained operational support from Baltimore City Recreation and Parks. BCRP teams prepare and care for park sites by opening gates, clearing and maintaining trails, removing trash, and supporting safe access for school groups. This behind-the-scenes stewardship makes outdoor learning possible in shared public spaces.

Field trips are designed to build skills over time, from observation and stewardship to hands-on investigation. As part of this progression, students work alongside researchers from the Baltimore Ecosystem Study and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies to study stream health using community science methods.

Students search under rocks for aquatic insects, identify tolerant and intolerant species, and use living clues to draw conclusions about water quality. Researchers reinforce student observations by using professional equipment, including a YSI probe.

Across grade levels, science learning is paired with careful movement and respectful interaction with living things. Students practice gentle observation and habitat care, learning that collecting evidence and caring for a place go hand in hand.

Time in meadows, forests, and along streams is paced to allow students to slow down and notice more. Activities alternate between active exploration and quieter moments of listening, sketching, and discussion. This rhythm helps students stay engaged while learning how to regulate their bodies, attention, and energy in outdoor settings.

History and ecology are woven together throughout the day. Students learn how the land has been used over time, who has lived and worked there, and how past decisions continue to shape present-day ecosystems. These conversations help students see the park not only as a natural space, but as a place shaped by people, culture, and responsibility.

Across all grade levels, students learn that how they leave a place matters. They return what they find, care for shared spaces, and move through the park in ways that honor the life around them, practicing what it means to be thoughtful guests in a living landscape.

With this foundation of care in place, students begin learning to recognize different tree species, deepening their relationship with their park and the many living beings within it.

A close encounter with a praying mantis and a spider invites gentleness and careful observation, reminding students that small lives deserve attention and respect.

Turning over logs reveals decomposers and insects at work, inviting students to see endings not as loss, but as part of the forest’s ongoing cycle of life.

Finding fungi creates a moment to introduce students to mycelium, the hidden network beneath the forest floor that breaks down what has fallen, shares nutrients, and helps plants communicate across the forest.

Meeting the rescued turkey at the nature center helps students understand animal care, injury, and the role humans play in protecting wildlife.

After meeting smaller lives up close, students shift their attention to the forest as a whole. Standing beside a towering tulip poplar gives them a sense of scale, time, and what it means for a tree to grow for generations.

After taking in the height and age of mature trees, students move among young saplings. Through games like squirrel tag, they learn about movement, awareness, and how animals depend on forest spaces to survive.

With closer attention at the stream, students discover that rocks shelter baby insects and that some macroinvertebrates indicate clean water, helping them understand how scientists assess stream health.

When students are given space to explore, the forest floor opens up, revealing leaves, insects, and patterns that reward curiosity and careful attention.

As these experiences accumulate, students come to expect learning that extends beyond classroom walls, recognizing outdoor learning as a vital part of their education.

Hiking on uneven terrain helps students build confidence, balance, and awareness of their bodies as they move through natural spaces.

Walking through trails covered in fallen leaves helps students experience seasonal cycles firsthand, revealing how forests grow, change, and renew over time. Learning to name tree species helps students move from seeing “trees” in general to recognizing individual beings, strengthening their relationship with their park.

Quiet moments resting in the leaves help students pause, notice the season, and feel held by the place around them.

Kindergarten

Across all of these experiences, learning in small groups with supportive adults helps students feel safe, seen, and respected, reflecting a core promise of the Baltimore Children’s Outdoor Bill of Rights.

Exploring local butterfly species inside the nature center helps students understand how habitats support life through different stages, offering a living metaphor for growth and change in Baltimore.

At the nature center, the weather station helps students extend their observations beyond plants and animals, connecting the forest around them to broader systems that track air, temperature, and climate over time.

As the rescued turkey continues its daily routine nearby, a turkey vulture dries its wings in the sun, helping students notice how different animals meet their needs in different ways and play distinct roles in the ecosystem.

Ending the day around the fire with shared stories and s’mores connects students to one of humanity’s oldest ways of learning together, reminding us that school once happened in circles, through listening, storytelling, and shared experience, and that it still can.

These field trips bring the Baltimore Children’s Outdoor Bill of Rights (COBOR) to life by giving students real access to nature, meaningful learning outdoors, and opportunities to care for shared spaces. They also connect classroom learning to a broader community science effort led by the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, in which data collected in parks, neighborhoods, and schools help residents understand environmental conditions across the city. In the next phase of this work, learning moves beyond student experiences to community-led projects that put research into practice and respond directly to local needs.

As a follow-up to the annual meeting of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, researchers, educators, and community partners came together to visit neighborhood-based projects responding directly to local environmental needs.

Participants met at the Difference Makers Center, then, in keeping with our place-based pedagogy, stepped outside and crossed the street together to visit Liberty Grace Church. The short walk reinforced a core principle of the work: learning happens best by moving through real places and seeing how ideas take shape as lived solutions.

At Liberty Grace Church, participants experienced a City-designated resiliency hub that is the first in Baltimore to include a solar-powered drinking water system, alongside a community information and emergency announcement screen capable of operating off-grid during extreme heat, storms, or power outages. The water system was installed by Noemi Florea and represents a real-world example of decentralized, low-energy water infrastructure already in use to meet everyday needs while strengthening emergency preparedness. Together, these features show how trusted neighborhood spaces can be upgraded with practical systems that respond directly to local environmental and public health challenges.

Seeing these projects in place grounds the work of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study in tangible outcomes. Environmental data, community knowledge, and local leadership come together here not just to understand environmental challenges, but to respond to them in practical ways. The visit demonstrates how community science can move beyond analysis and into action, strengthening resilience for children, families, and neighborhoods.

InDiGO is one of three organizations leading the Baltimore Forest School Co-op. At the heart of the Baltimore Forest School is a simple belief: children are not just future leaders, but present-day learners whose experiences shape the city they will inherit.

BFS is a cross-sector coalition working across education, environment, health, and community development to make the Baltimore Children’s Outdoor Bill of Rights (COBOR) a lived reality. Through partnerships with schools, parks, faith institutions, researchers, and neighborhood organizations, BFS helps create and sustain safe, meaningful outdoor learning experiences for children across Baltimore.

BFS’s work centers on a holistic model that connects curriculum, educator development, outdoor spaces, community-based research, and scaled forest schooling to support healthier communities, stronger ecosystems, and brighter futures.

Its curriculum framework supports learning from birth through abundant life and is designed to adapt across public schools, private schools, and homeschool contexts. Through teacher training, educators deepen their capacity to lead outdoor, hands-on learning grounded in ecology, inquiry, and place.

Curated outdoor spaces transform parks, greenways, and neighborhood nature patches into intentional classrooms. Community-based research engages residents, youth, and partners in collecting data and solving real-world problems that advance both education and environmental health.

Together, these efforts align student learning with broader civic and ecological goals, deepen ecological literacy, and build systems that support lifelong connection to nature for children and adults alike.

The Baltimore Forest School’s child-centered, quad-sector model shows how systems can be reimagined by placing children at the center—integrating education, health, environment, and economy into a cohesive, community-driven approach to long-term wellbeing. Making the Baltimore Children’s Outdoor Bill of Rights real means moving beyond powerful language to build the infrastructure, policies, and lived experiences that allow children, families, and neighborhoods to thrive.

Nature Everywhere Week returns April 19–25, 2026! 

Save the dates and join us for Baltimore's 2nd annual week-long stewardship festival.

Want Some InDiGO Swag?

Check Out Our New Online Store!

If this work moves you, help us move it forward. Share this newsletter with anyone who might align with our mission or be inspired by our work. 

Please find us on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube @InwardDiscovery.