Forest Kids

Forest Kids
The children’s playground is a riot of forest debris, mounds of
earth, caverns and uprooted trees. Beneath their feet, mossy roots
run like twisted cables across the squishy floor. Hulks of dead logs
are strewn in all directions as if Mother Nature has been playing
pick-up sticks.
A skinny trunk, smooth with age, juts across the clearing,
pinned at one end and, at the other, suspended above ground. A
small girl straddles it, pushing her pink rubber boots off the earth
below. Up and down, up and down, goes her teeter-totter.
Someone else has found nature’s monkey bars.
“Ms. Lockerbie, can you please spot me on this tree?”
This is playtime for an unusual kindergarten class at Sangster
Elementary School in Colwood, B.C., a suburb west of Victoria.
When the 8:40 bell rings each weekday morning and the rest of
the school goes indoors, the 21 children in Nature Kindergarten
head out across the grassy field behind the school, through a gate
in the chain link fence and into the adjacent forest lands owned by
Royal Roads University.
They stay for the morning. Every day — rain, shine, fog or chill.
When the wind kicks up, they head to the saltwater lagoon or the
sheltered beaches on the nearby Strait of Juan de Fuca to watch
birds and look for gifts the tide has delivered.
Afternoons, they are indoors with the usual kindergarten fare
— the book trolley, play kitchen, paints and glue, the alphabet and
their artwork adorning the walls. Most of what they learn will be
linked to what they discovered in the woods that morning.
The two-year pilot project, launched in fall 2012, is modelled
after forest schools that have long flourished in Scandinavia, Germany
and Britain, where young children learn through free play,
movement and hands-on experience in nature. Outside, they rely
on their senses, observe the changing of the seasons and are driven
by their own curiosity about the world around them.
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