First Outdoor Lesson Teacher
This is the first time that, on National Outdoor Lesson Day, an initiative of IVN Nature Education and Jantje Beton, the Outdoor Lesson Teacher of the Year award has been announced. The organizers look back on a highly successful first edition. More than 200 primary school teachers from across the country were nominated for the title. IVN and Jantje Beton also hope that the election will inspire other primary school teachers to teach outdoors more often.
Tine Nieboer certainly knows how to deliver an inspiring lesson outdoors. The adult jury praised her outdoor lessons, which offer considerable depth, room for awareness and for getting to know yourself. The Amsterdam teacher was also the children’s jury’s favorite. “Teacher Tine goes to the woods a lot. We think that’s really cool! She gives the children a lot of freedom to learn for themselves. She inspires others, and her ideas are actually being adopted by other schools in the area.”
With this, Teacher Tine leaves the 11 other provincial winners behind her. Teacher Esther de Boer of Het Kompas primary school in Meppel (Drenthe) and Teacher Marieke Suikerbuik of Ste. Marie primary school in Huijbergen (North Brabant) shared second place.
Mission: 25 percent outdoor lessons
This year, IVN and Jantje Beton are organizing National Outdoor Lesson Day for the eighth time, the day dedicated to highlighting the importance of learning outdoors. For years, all kinds of studies have shown that teaching mathematics and language outdoors has a very positive effect on children. It is healthy, children exercise more, they can concentrate better, and the material is retained more effectively. Nevertheless, barely 1 percent of lessons are currently taught outdoors. In IVN and Jantje Beton’s view, this percentage should be increased to 25 percent within the foreseeable future.