Outdoor & Experiential Education
What if a classroom had no walls? What if every child had a chance to be a leader? What if we expanded our definition of what it means to be a successful student? These are the questions that inform Marin Horizon’s Experiential Education (XED) program.
Since the school’s founding, Marin Horizon students have been exploring natural spaces, practicing environmental stewardship, and honoring our community. Today, the school’s robust XED program combines 1) Outdoor Education, 2) Travel Program, and 3) Service Learning to teach leadership, teamwork, independence, first-aid, and real-world problem-solving, all with an emphasis on caring for the environment and ourselves.
hr
OUTDOOR EDUCATION
Our curriculum focuses on developing young leaders, teaching practical skills, inspiring an appreciation for nature, and, above all, building independence and resilience.
Marin Horizon’s outdoor education occurs throughout the year, includes every student on our campus, and all overnight trips are programmed and staffed by our own faculty members.
When new families learn that Marin Horizon kindergarteners experience an overnight camping trip - without parents! - at the end of the school year, reactions run the gamut from anticipation to fear, awe to anxiety. But when our kindergarteners return from their first formal outdoor education experience, the reactions are always the same: pride and joy.
After that first kindergarten overnight, students progress to multi-night trips in first through third grade that include mixed-grade team building, practical science lessons, campfire traditions, environmental education, and our famous river walk, all led by faculty, staff, and Marin Horizon alumni.
Beginning in fifth grade, outdoor education becomes both more challenging and more rewarding. Students hike-in to campsites on the nearby Mount Tamalpais State Park, as well as more remote destinations, and learn crucial skills such as navigation and map reading, first aid, fire skills, cooking and provisioning, water filtration, packing and campsite setup, and more. They learn to safely push their limits and support one another.
TRAVEL PROGRAM
We believe that travel moves learning out of the abstract and into lived experience—history is no longer just something you read about, cultures are no longer distant, and independence becomes something students practice, not just talk about.
Marin Horizon School offers two travel experiences for seventh and eighth graders. In odd-numbered years, students may choose to participate in an optional international trip during spring break. In even-numbered years, all students take part in a domestic, U.S. history–based trip that aligns with the social studies curriculum and takes place during a regular school week in the spring; the cost of this trip is included in tuition. In 2025, 27 enthusiastic students travelled to Costa Rica; planning is currently underway for the 2026 Washington, D.C. trip.
These travel experiences offer students immersive learning opportunities that foster independence, cultivate empathy, and deepen their understanding of both global cultures and American history—ultimately helping them develop a broader perspective on the world and their role within it.
SERVICE LEARNING
Our service learning program is guided by the needs of our community. Rather than simply asking students to volunteer for the sake of volunteering, we ask what our community needs and design our program to match.
This means that our students are often volunteering close to home, sometimes right in our own school community. We seek input from our neighbors and send groups of students into the Homestead Valley Land Trust to help remove invasive species or to support the Homestead Valley Music Festival. Farther away, our students have cared for the newly restored Redwood Creek watershed at Muir Beach, served meals at Glide Memorial Church, and provided care packages for the unhoused at Ritter Center.
any text
Join us for a hike!
Loading from Vimeo...
hr
“Seeing all the nature makes you feel like you’re meant to be there."
Fourth Grade Student
“Marin Horizon’s Outdoor Education program is designed to inspire a love of environmental stewardship, of experiential learning, and to account for kids who are their best selves when they can be active and interact with nature,” says Jesse Pearson, 8th grade language arts teacher and former director of the Marin Horizon Experiential Education program.
Two features of our program are particularly unique:
1) Our PE program is really an extension of our experiential/outdoor education program–PE Teachers Joel Booth and Stevie Lee are making use of the environment around our campus.
2) We’re essentially surrounded by dedicated open space. The Homestead Valley Land Trust is a trail network that we can access within a quarter mile of our campus, and beyond that the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Mt Tamalpais State Park are the spaces that our kids expect to spend time in. It’s all in our backyard!
Our kids are getting off campus into wild spaces on an almost weekly basis
Our Middle School kids doing more than 20 hikes a year. We hop on our buses and vans, and we’re out at Muir Beach, or Tennessee Valley, or Fort Cronkite, or we’re running the Dipsea and taking a dunk in Three Wells when the water’s warm. For almost every kid–even our most traditionally athletic kids–we hear comments regularly about how much they love that our PE program is not just confined to court and field sports.
hr