Into the woods: When preschoolers spend every class outdoors

SEATTLE, WASH. — Three-year-old Desi Sorrelgreen’s favorite thing about his preschool is “running up hills.” His classmate Stelyn Carter, 5, likes to “be quiet and listen to birds—crows, owls and chickadees,” as she put it. And for Joshua Doctorow, 4, the best thing about preschool just might be the hat (black and fuzzy, with flaps that come down over his ears) he loves to wear to class.

All three children are students at Fiddleheads Forest School, where they spend four hours a day, rain or shine, in adjacent cedar grove “classrooms” nestled among the towering trees of the University of Washington Botanical Gardens.

In its third year, the program is located less than seven miles from Microsoft, which means while some parents sit in front of computers all day inventing the digital future, the Fiddleheads kids are making letters out of sticks or carting rocks around in wheelbarrows.

Founded in 2012 by Kit Harrington, a certified preschool teacher, and Sarah Heller, a naturalist and science educator, Fiddleheads is part of a larger national trend that goes beyond Waldorf education, which has long emphasized outdoor play even in inclement weather.

There’s the Chippewa Nature Center in Midland, Mich., founded in 2007, where kids wear hats and mittens during daily outdoor sessions in the frigid winter months. At the All Friends Nature School in San Diego, Calif., which became a nature preschool in 2006, kids often spend mornings making sandcastles at the beach. And at the Drumlin Farm Community Preschool in Lincoln, Mass., founded in 2008, kids learn to feed farm animals, grow vegetables, and explore the farm’s many acres of wildlife habitat.

Whether the schools are emerging in reaction to concerns that early education has become increasingly academic or simply because parents think traipsing around in the woods sounds like more fun than sitting at a desk, they are increasingly popular. The Natural Start Alliance, founded in 2013 in response to demand from a growing number of nature preschool providers, now counts 92 schools that deliberately put nature at the heart of their programs and in which children spend a significant portion of each day outside, according to director Christy Merrick. That’s up from 20 schools in 2008, when Patti Bailie, a professor at the University of Maine at Farmington, counted them as part of her doctoral research…

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Photo Credit: Meryl Schenker for The Hechinger Report