Learn more about our program
When children play outdoors they build skills like emotional resilience, self-esteem, critical thinking and creativity. Playing outdoors also allows healthy risk taking, which encourages children to build confidence and explore their own physical capabilities.
All of these skills promote autonomy and support a child’s academic readiness during the school-age years.
Program details
At Forest School, we foster every child’s social, emotional, cognitive, and physical development. Children will develop a relationship with the land, themselves, and each other in a supportive community of learners. Our teaching approach is focused on seasonal sessions of exploring nature, doing crafts, promoting language and literacy, as well as engaging in earth science.
Our approach is place-based and therefore the land around us and the daily experiences we are having in the environment, greatly influence what we teach. We also practice emergent curriculum, which allows for the children’s arising interests to guide the content they learn.
Play Based
Our program is play-based and we afford children diverse experiences in a natural forest setting. The forest offers children abundant sensory experiences which facilitates concrete learning in early childhood.
This means that rather than focusing heavily on academic readiness, we allow children to play and learn through concrete experiences they are having in the natural environment.
Studies show that preschool children who are allowed to play and explore their own interests, gain a sense of autonomy and do better in school once they reach kindergarten and beyond. However we still focus on early reading, writing, math skills and alphabet awareness in our program.
Place-based
We are a fully outdoor program and will be engaging in our outdoor spaces in all types of weather. Our school also offers a 38 ft. canvas sky lodge, which acts as our outdoor living classroom. The children will have a sense of which parts of the forest they are in and get to know them intimately.
We strive to create an environment that nurtures their growth and facilitates their lifelong learning. Together in the forest we are creating a sense of belonging to the earth and to each other.