By Eleanor Emlen Healthy Roar reporters | Green spaces are areas where plants, flowers, grass, and trees can grow. Emlen has green spaces with garden beds, grassy areas, and some trees.

Being outside helps kids feel good and stay active. It can also help them in school. When students can see green spaces from the classroom window, they can perform better in schoolwork, according to University of Illinois researchers. They said seeing green spaces created “an opportunity for the brain to rest and restore its ability to focus attention again.”

Ms. Crump’s third-grade grade cub reporters walked around the outside of the school and looked for green spaces and ways to improve them. Some ideas the cub reporters came up with were:

• Add more trees or plants to the grassy hill in the recess yard.
• Clean up and plant new plants in the garden beds by the front entrance.
• Turn some of the pavement in the schoolyard into a grassy area for kids to hang out in.

“With more grassy areas where we can sit, we could enjoy the outdoors more during recess,” one student said. Another said, “On a nice day, we could have class outside.”

Contributed by Healthy Roar cub reporters.

Illustration Maliyah, fourth grade, Eleanor Emlen Healthy Roar, 2023–24.