“To the brook! To the brook!” the three girls chanted in Finnish as they skipped through the forest. Within a few minutes, the other kindergartners had joined them in the fern-covered gully. As their teacher Kaija Pelo and I stood on a hill observing the children at play below us, two boys in baseball caps poked sticks into the brook (Pelo said they were “fishing”) while other children teetered across a fallen pine tree, which served as a natural bridge over the running water. Most kindergartners, though, appeared to be doing nothing except wandering along the length of the brook.
For these 5- and 6-year-olds, this forest is their kindergarten classroom—nearly 80 percent of the time.
Four days a week, from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. (Finland’s required amount of daily kindergarten instruction), this group of 14 children is outside with their veteran teacher and two classroom aides. In Finland, this is not a typical kindergarten setting (only a handful of forest kindergartens exist in this Nordic country), but in Europe, such places have been popular for decades.
Their teacher, who was following me, led the children in counting as they all jumped into the hole in the ground. “One, two, three, four!” they counted in Finnish. (For good measure, I jumped into the ditch, too.) The teacher, Pelo, explained that this experience represented how she and the two aides aspire to teach the kindergartners in the woods. She described this approach as “secret” learning, when children are unaware that they’re learning academic content. In the forest, these Finnish educators might lead the children to find sticks of varying lengths and organize them from shortest to longest, form letters out of natural materials, or count mushrooms.
“The research strongly suggests that time in nature can help many children learn to build confidence in themselves; reduce the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, calm children, and help them focus,” Richard Louv, the author of Last Child in the Woods and co-founder of the Children and Nature Network, said in an email. “There are some indications that natural play spaces can reduce bullying. It can also be a buffer to child obesity and overweight, and offers other psychological and physical health benefits.”
After observing the Finnish forest kindergarten for an hour and a half, I knew I had seen something magical, but I couldn’t help but think that this sort of arrangement was so far from being realized in most American kindergartens, where play-based learning has significantly decreased, and young children typically spend many hours inside one cinderblock classroom, on a daily basis.
When I asked Louv what he would suggest to American teachers, he offeredseveral ideas, some of which appeared in his newest book Vitamin N (a collection of 500 nature-based activities): create a sensory garden, take students outside for a half-hour to journal about their experiences in the wild, host a scavenger hunt, or encourage independent reading outside, for example.
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