Forest Kids

Forest Kids
Cree, 54 and co-author of a book on knife use in forest schools,
was surprised to learn that little kids whittling, splitting wood and
building fires was never going to cut it in Canada.
He’s nonetheless gung-ho about helping to get any forest school
off the ground. They represent “the fastest growing education
movement I’ve ever come across,” says Cree, an executive of Britain’s
Forest School Association who has been teaching kids outside
for three decades.
“It’s literally gone feral, without any government input.”
There are so many forest schools in Britain in different forms
that no one has definitive numbers — 360 in Worcestershire alone
and thousands across England, Scotland and Wales. Tracking
them is one of the new association’s first tasks.
Cree says the trend took off for two key reasons: concern over
kids’ lack of outdoor time and the diminishing health of young
children, and backlash against a top-down education system increasingly
geared to standardized tests and focused on outcomes
rather than the learning process.
—
When Frances Krusekopf arrived in Munich three years ago on
sabbatical with her husband and two kids, she couldn’t have predicted
the keepsake she would soon bring home to B.C.
While her daughter Louisa went to her Grade 1 class, 4-year-old
Niko joined the local kids every day at waldkindergarten, where
his favourite pastimes were rappelling down steep riverbanks and
learning to whittle.
“How could you possibly not have this in Canada?” parents
asked Krusekopf, at the time the district principal of curriculum
with the Sooke School District near Victoria. Forest schools had
been a fixture in Denmark since the ’50s, with other Scandinavian
countries, as well as Germany and Britain, following in its foot-
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