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Once a week, rain, shine or even in the sub-zero depths of winter, a group of Ottawa five- and six-year-olds spends all day out in the forest.
They climb trees, built forts out of sticks, collect skulls, bones and feathers, search for salamanders and frog eggs and get very, very muddy. They sustain minor scrapes and bruises, know what a dead animal looks like and get their feet wet if they venture into the pond over the tops of their rubber boots.
“I like learning at Forest School because you don’t just sit down,” one Meadowlands Public School student told his Grade 1 teacher, Jackie Whelan.
“I fell out of a tree and lived to tell the tale,” another reported.
“A lot of parents scratch their heads and ask why this is so novel,” says Whelan. “But kids don’t have access to free play with risks anymore.”
Located in a swath of woodland in the greenbelt near Kanata, Ottawa’s Forest and Nature School is one of about 100 similar programs across Canada. It’s part of a boom that is, in part, a reaction to free-range childhoods that have morphed into bubble-wrapped, over-digitized kids in the space of a couple of generations.
Forest schools are also centred on the idea that children benefit from regular and repeated exposure to natural spaces, exploring wherever their imaginations and curiosity might lead them.
It sounds like a free-wheeling hippie-dippie sort of ideal, but it’s based on evidence that children learn better by exploring and doing what they want to do instead of sitting at desks filling in worksheets. Canadian developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld, for example, has argued against kindergartens, unless they are “play-based,” and play was the basis of the full-day kindergarten program rolled out by the province in 2010.
Carrying a couple of buckets and a walking stick, a boy heads out to explore the woods.
Play-based education means that children are allowed to play and direct their own learning with minimal direction from adults, says Queen’s University outdoor and experiential education professor Elizabath MacEachern.
“Play is children’s work and their job in life is to learn,” she says. “They learn about balance and levers when they climb trees. They learn about compassion by watching others express and sort out their emotions. They learn what adults do by watching adults, whether that is sit at desks behind devices or take walks and notice where the leeks are coming up through the ground.”
Open-ended free play helps to promote the development of “executive functioning,” which includes skills such as planning, organizing and decision-making, says David Sobel, an education professor at Antioch University New England in New Hampshire and author of Nature Preschools and Nature Kindergartens.
“It’s a better indicator of future success than letter and number recognition.”
Children sift through the “treasure box” of bones, rocks and feathers and other objects found on the forest floor.
Are there risks to jumping off logs and wading in ponds? Sure, but the risks are outweighed by the benefits, says Marlene Power, executive director of the Child and Nature Alliance of Canada, which has already trained 120 nature school “practitioners” across the country — mostly teachers and early childhood educators — with another 80 in the pipeline.
“To a child, it shouldn’t feel like learning,” says Power.
Students from Meadowlands and Centennial Public School are in the forest one day a week as part of a pilot project to look at the value of play-based schooling. So far, 14 Ottawa Carleton District School Board classes participated in forest school this year on a regular, repeated basis.
At forest school, there are rules, but they are few and simple. Children are rarely seen without a stick in hand, but they also understand the imperative that “sticks need space.” Hazards like ticks and poison ivy are managed with knowledge instead of fear. If a child wants to climb a dead tree, there’s conversation about whether it looks sturdy enough to climb. Usually, the child decides for him or herself that it’s not a good idea. On the other hand, a game the children call “Timber!” which involves toppling a small dead tree, is very popular.
“There are risks everywhere. In the city, it’s pollution and traffic. Indoors, it could be online predators and household mould. Kids want to experience minor risks,” says Power.
There are few toys — forest schools use “loose parts” like string, a box of chalk, and a few pieces of lumber to supplement the rocks, leaves and sticks the children scavenge from the forest floor.
In many of the 700 “waldkindergartens” in Germany, the only shelter is an unheated yurt or a shed and an outdoor toilet. By these standards, Forest and Nature School is downright luxurious — it has a cabin equipped with a woodstove and a composting toilet. But even on one of the coldest days of February, when their classmates at school weren’t allowed outdoors at recess, the Meadowlands students spent almost all day in the forest, warming up only long enough to launch another foray into the snowy woods.
“After 15 minutes for lunch, they all barrelled out the door,” says lead educator Sonja Lukassen.
Whelan and senior kindergarten teacher Joanne Burbidge says children learn a lot in the forest that applies to the academic curriculum. Children count and classify things they find. They tell stories about their experiences, write in their journals, learn about the principles of engineering by building a dam out of sticks. Last week, a group of students spent all day building a “blacksmith shop” and devising a bartering system for exchanging found objects.
“Bones or feathers could be so many different things in their imagination. They could be tools, or money,” says Whelan.
This week, they decided to write a play and make animal masks out of birch bark. Back at school, they draw maps of the forest and identify the plants and animals they discover by using field guides.
Forest school has never descended into Lord of the Flies — it is well, but gently, supervised — and there has never been a serious injury, says Whelan. In fact, ordinary gym classes, where kids have to wait for their turn to do an activity, are more likely to result in a injury. “Kids get hurt when they have to wait around.”
Whelan has measured the impact of forest school on student well-being after a year. Before, students asked to draw themselves in nature drew picture of trips they had taken on vacation. After, they drew pictures of the forest.
A class navigates its way through the forest.
Meanwhile, their French vocabulary grew to include words to describe their experiences and the names of trees, birds and animals. Their motor skills, orientation and confidence improved because they had to navigate around random tree roots and long-hanging branches.
“There are some children who have never walked on an uneven surface before,” says Whelan.
Burbidge found her students reported spending more time in their own backyards. Reluctant writers and artists were happy to write and draw. Introverts become more gregarious in the forest, and extroverts weren’t shushed.
“Here, you don’t have to use your indoor voice,” she says.
There are other benefits, says Whelan. Research suggests that children with attention deficit disorder better able to stay on task and understand that actions have consequences when they are exposed to green spaces. Children who are allowed to make mistakes bounce back from adversity.
Antioch University’s Sobel says forest schools also have an effect on families. Parents spend more time outdoors and children introduce their parents to natural areas they have discovered.
While there’s been quite a lot of research on the educational advantages of forest schools in Europe, so far it’s pretty scant in North America, he says. One study by University of Victoria researchers looked at two groups of students, one from a regular kindergarten and one from a nature school. After a year, the nature school students had improved their motor skills “significantly more” than the students in regular kindergarten.
“The greatest danger is keeping kids indoors,” says Sobel.
jlaucius@postmedia.com
查看原文...
They climb trees, built forts out of sticks, collect skulls, bones and feathers, search for salamanders and frog eggs and get very, very muddy. They sustain minor scrapes and bruises, know what a dead animal looks like and get their feet wet if they venture into the pond over the tops of their rubber boots.
“I like learning at Forest School because you don’t just sit down,” one Meadowlands Public School student told his Grade 1 teacher, Jackie Whelan.
“I fell out of a tree and lived to tell the tale,” another reported.
“A lot of parents scratch their heads and ask why this is so novel,” says Whelan. “But kids don’t have access to free play with risks anymore.”
Located in a swath of woodland in the greenbelt near Kanata, Ottawa’s Forest and Nature School is one of about 100 similar programs across Canada. It’s part of a boom that is, in part, a reaction to free-range childhoods that have morphed into bubble-wrapped, over-digitized kids in the space of a couple of generations.
Forest schools are also centred on the idea that children benefit from regular and repeated exposure to natural spaces, exploring wherever their imaginations and curiosity might lead them.
It sounds like a free-wheeling hippie-dippie sort of ideal, but it’s based on evidence that children learn better by exploring and doing what they want to do instead of sitting at desks filling in worksheets. Canadian developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld, for example, has argued against kindergartens, unless they are “play-based,” and play was the basis of the full-day kindergarten program rolled out by the province in 2010.
Carrying a couple of buckets and a walking stick, a boy heads out to explore the woods.
Play-based education means that children are allowed to play and direct their own learning with minimal direction from adults, says Queen’s University outdoor and experiential education professor Elizabath MacEachern.
“Play is children’s work and their job in life is to learn,” she says. “They learn about balance and levers when they climb trees. They learn about compassion by watching others express and sort out their emotions. They learn what adults do by watching adults, whether that is sit at desks behind devices or take walks and notice where the leeks are coming up through the ground.”
Open-ended free play helps to promote the development of “executive functioning,” which includes skills such as planning, organizing and decision-making, says David Sobel, an education professor at Antioch University New England in New Hampshire and author of Nature Preschools and Nature Kindergartens.
“It’s a better indicator of future success than letter and number recognition.”
Children sift through the “treasure box” of bones, rocks and feathers and other objects found on the forest floor.
Are there risks to jumping off logs and wading in ponds? Sure, but the risks are outweighed by the benefits, says Marlene Power, executive director of the Child and Nature Alliance of Canada, which has already trained 120 nature school “practitioners” across the country — mostly teachers and early childhood educators — with another 80 in the pipeline.
“To a child, it shouldn’t feel like learning,” says Power.
Students from Meadowlands and Centennial Public School are in the forest one day a week as part of a pilot project to look at the value of play-based schooling. So far, 14 Ottawa Carleton District School Board classes participated in forest school this year on a regular, repeated basis.
At forest school, there are rules, but they are few and simple. Children are rarely seen without a stick in hand, but they also understand the imperative that “sticks need space.” Hazards like ticks and poison ivy are managed with knowledge instead of fear. If a child wants to climb a dead tree, there’s conversation about whether it looks sturdy enough to climb. Usually, the child decides for him or herself that it’s not a good idea. On the other hand, a game the children call “Timber!” which involves toppling a small dead tree, is very popular.
“There are risks everywhere. In the city, it’s pollution and traffic. Indoors, it could be online predators and household mould. Kids want to experience minor risks,” says Power.
There are few toys — forest schools use “loose parts” like string, a box of chalk, and a few pieces of lumber to supplement the rocks, leaves and sticks the children scavenge from the forest floor.
In many of the 700 “waldkindergartens” in Germany, the only shelter is an unheated yurt or a shed and an outdoor toilet. By these standards, Forest and Nature School is downright luxurious — it has a cabin equipped with a woodstove and a composting toilet. But even on one of the coldest days of February, when their classmates at school weren’t allowed outdoors at recess, the Meadowlands students spent almost all day in the forest, warming up only long enough to launch another foray into the snowy woods.
“After 15 minutes for lunch, they all barrelled out the door,” says lead educator Sonja Lukassen.
Whelan and senior kindergarten teacher Joanne Burbidge says children learn a lot in the forest that applies to the academic curriculum. Children count and classify things they find. They tell stories about their experiences, write in their journals, learn about the principles of engineering by building a dam out of sticks. Last week, a group of students spent all day building a “blacksmith shop” and devising a bartering system for exchanging found objects.
“Bones or feathers could be so many different things in their imagination. They could be tools, or money,” says Whelan.
This week, they decided to write a play and make animal masks out of birch bark. Back at school, they draw maps of the forest and identify the plants and animals they discover by using field guides.
Forest school has never descended into Lord of the Flies — it is well, but gently, supervised — and there has never been a serious injury, says Whelan. In fact, ordinary gym classes, where kids have to wait for their turn to do an activity, are more likely to result in a injury. “Kids get hurt when they have to wait around.”
Whelan has measured the impact of forest school on student well-being after a year. Before, students asked to draw themselves in nature drew picture of trips they had taken on vacation. After, they drew pictures of the forest.
A class navigates its way through the forest.
Meanwhile, their French vocabulary grew to include words to describe their experiences and the names of trees, birds and animals. Their motor skills, orientation and confidence improved because they had to navigate around random tree roots and long-hanging branches.
“There are some children who have never walked on an uneven surface before,” says Whelan.
Burbidge found her students reported spending more time in their own backyards. Reluctant writers and artists were happy to write and draw. Introverts become more gregarious in the forest, and extroverts weren’t shushed.
“Here, you don’t have to use your indoor voice,” she says.
There are other benefits, says Whelan. Research suggests that children with attention deficit disorder better able to stay on task and understand that actions have consequences when they are exposed to green spaces. Children who are allowed to make mistakes bounce back from adversity.
Antioch University’s Sobel says forest schools also have an effect on families. Parents spend more time outdoors and children introduce their parents to natural areas they have discovered.
While there’s been quite a lot of research on the educational advantages of forest schools in Europe, so far it’s pretty scant in North America, he says. One study by University of Victoria researchers looked at two groups of students, one from a regular kindergarten and one from a nature school. After a year, the nature school students had improved their motor skills “significantly more” than the students in regular kindergarten.
“The greatest danger is keeping kids indoors,” says Sobel.
jlaucius@postmedia.com
查看原文...
