The growth of nature-based schools in North America is being driven by both educators and parents. Responding to an erosion of opportunities for unstructured outdoor play, especially in natural settings, parents and educators, who had a radically different experience of childhood than do many children today, are seeking avenues for this type of play for today's children. Many of us remember experiences in our own childhoods as having the qualities of timelessness, wonder, adventure, and leaving us with a feeling of deep satisfaction. Recent trends in early years education have recently moved towards a focus on acquiring and drilling direct academic skills and facts, and away from play and practical work. Some folks are responding to this changing landscape, seeking alternatives that honor the needs of young children for near constant motion and play. One might say they are looking to give children a more "natural" childhood. Still others, are responding to a growing recognition of the environmental problems we all face and are looking for a "new" way to educate the next generation.
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We are often asked if the children “just” play all day. The answer is no. And yes. Play is how the child meets the world and makes sense of it. For two hours, these children studied the water flowing through the creek. They tracked the places where it flowed more rapidly and more slowly. They marked the places where debris might become stuck on its journey downstream. Their boats made these patterns more easily visible.
The day will come, later in their education, when they will likely study the movement and properties of water. Having played with it over and over, these concepts will literally make sense. Their knowledge will be born of their direct sensory experience and that knowledge will be so deeply embodied that they may never know how it is that they know. Through play, we connect, and through our senses, experience the world we live in. Relationships, built on the foundations of self-directed inquiry, direct experiences, observation over time, and joy are built through the genius of play.
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Forest School has always been me, it defines me, but I needed the guidance of those who have come before. Forest School combines all my passions into one: caring for the Earth, learning about local flora and fauna, primitive skills, and the development of the youngest members of our human race. All of that is covered in teacher training and more.
I have never gained more as a teacher or as a human in any level of my education than I did in the 3 years of teacher training. I am so grateful for the extreme detail and thought the Academy put into every aspect of what we do as forest school teachers.
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Young children, through their senses, take in impressions of the world without judgment, and the quality of those sense impressions matters. In fact, they affect the remainder of a person's life. In early childhood we develop the foundation for all future relationships.
Read MoreBy Julie Hackett
Forest Kindergarten Teacher Training 2018
The Foundation Course readings open a doorway of knowledge into the developmental inner-workings of the young child's mind and physical senses. In walking through that threshold I see many paths of knowledge leading me toward an evolving capacity to support each child in their own journey of developing their full human capacity, with as little interference from an underdeveloped motor-sensory system as possible. The common threads I found throughout all of the readings center on the stages of physical, psychological and cognitive development of the young child; biological expectations; importance of free, imaginative and risky play in the formation of the self; movement (motor-sensory development) as a cornerstone to higher thinking (emotional-cognitive and verbal-intellectual development). I would like to focus my thoughts upon the biological expectations of the child, which include movement, imitation worthy activity (meaningful work), and a caregiver to model or entrain human behavior and culture.
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By Erin Boehme and CJ Cintas
Wild Roots Forest School Teachers, Eastern Sierra
Today we tip-toed into the wet grass and explored the waters flowing from the mountains into our park and we met a man named Mr. Ranny who came to us with an offering.
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