FAMILY MATTERS
Rain or shine: the rise of
Forest Schools
Given the weather we typically enjoy here in the UK, it may come as a surprise that outdoor schools, where children learn through outside play, all year round, warmed only by sunshine or open fires, are gaining popularity
Words Sophie Astin
F
orest Schools, as they are known, originated in snowy Scandinavia and by the 1980s the approach was widely adopted in Danish nurseries run on Scandinavian friluftsliv (“open air life”) principles as a solution to the lack of indoor facilities for pre-school children. It was these principles that lay behind the first forest school in the UK, which opened in Somerset in 1993. Jon Cree, Chair of the Forest School Association, agrees that the popularity of outdoor schools is, in part, a reaction against the contemporary testing culture. Forest schools have fallen victim to public sector cuts – until recently, a number of local authorities employed staff to develop forest school sessions in mainstream schools but all but one has lost their job. And yet the movement is growing in Britain and beyond. In Germany there are more than
1,000 forest kindergartens now, where children from ages three to six spend every day outside, all year round. Jon recently visited South Korea and found 40% of its kindergartens undertaking some form of forest school education.
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“They want to move it into their very regimented primary and secondary schools,” he says.
An outdoor education
Nadia Romano, a former childminder from Tonbridge, launched Rain or Shine Forest Preschool, in Judd Wood Farm between Bidborough and Tonbridge, in 2015, the second only of its kind to be set up in the county. She received an ‘Outstanding’ inspection in May 2016 and having already expanded, is now looking for more land to open a third site in 2018. Adriana Forrester explains why she chose an outdoor nursery setting for her son: “It’s an experiential and child-led form of learning; he witnesses the life cycle and the seasons – and how many other three- year-olds get to use a knife to chop vegetables to make their own soup over a campfire for lunch?” With a bell tent and parachute canopy for shelter, compostable toilets, a large mud kitchen made from pallets and recycled wood, a sawing horse and an activity table, children follow the Early Years
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© Kate York – The Happy Picture Company
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