Saplings aspires to foster a student’s lifelong connection to place by using the materials around us to learn while we explore our local community’s natural playground.  By fostering an intimate daily relationship with the natural world, suffused with observations and questions, our indoor and outdoor classrooms are saturated with emergent moments of inquiry, sensory entanglements, spontaneous learning opportunities, provocative conversations, and meaningful connections.

These connections to self, others, and place foster students’ lifelong understanding of the need for sustainable practices, while at the same time attending to their social-emotional needs.  Seen as imaginative, inquisitive, and resourceful agents, students are given opportunities to link what they are thinking about to what they already know by operating fully with and in place.

Based on the idea that nature is a powerful teacher and challenging the idea that we as humans are separate from it, Saplings invites children into the natural world as a classroom.​