Forskoleklass (Forest K)
“The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil.”
Snapshot
Hours
8:45 AM - 3:15 PM
Days
Fall 2023 - Spring 2024
Primary Teachers
Sam Giacobetti
Age
4.5s & 5s
(our work with 4.5s is dependent upon readiness and interest)
Food
Morning & Afternoon organic snack provided
(students bring their own lunch)
Focus
Intro to Phonemic Awareness, Language & Literacy, and Math
(we use Wild Reading and Wild Math curriculums as well as both Montessori and Waldorf-inspired learning materials)
Location
EarthStar Farm
(see our ‘Connect’ page for directions)
About the Program
We want to start by saying that this is a Kindergarten-level supplemental program. We do not see this as a competing program for a full-time Kindergarten classroom, as all of our foxes are part-time here at Foxtail. At our Forest K, we believe in the value of your child spending more time playing alongside birches, pretending to be animals, carving sticks into pointy-hatted gnomes, and being granted full permission to do ‘nothing’, to argue and feel hurt by their friends, to deconstruct differently-sized piles of poop, and build swale-bridges with those same friends. The research on forest kinder-level programs, and their nature-y ilk, has piled up, printed on enough paper to burn into being a reliable crop of morels the following spring. But all of that may be immaterial to a more central idea: forest kindergartens and early childhood nature schools preserve a special aspect of childhood—not a return to a charmed age of innocence, or any other fictionalized period of history.
A childhood, supported in an educational setting, that facilitates risk and struggle and discomfort (and even good ‘ole boredom), so that authentic feelings of competence, problem-solving, self-confidence, and the divergent thinking to cut a new path or emerge from a rut is possible. To feel cold and to know how to endure it. To slop around in puddles so we can appreciate what lives there. To feel secure enough to be quiet, and learn to be alone without feeling lonely. And maybe most importantly, to try on and listen to new emotions, in the privacy of a snowberry burrow, because the space for a real interiority is as threatened as any grizzly bear. In these moments of discovery, where the full breadth of joy and uncertainty and novelty can be explored, the concepts and skills your child needs to flourish find a more favorable soil to root in.
In keeping with our Scandinavian roots, it is the Danish way to view children through the same democratic and humanistic lens as adults. This requires that children have access to challenges that develop their self-esteem and opportunities to assert their independence. This requires freedom, the kind that allows for mistakes and considers the individual and the group with equal weight. And it asserts their right to discover who they are within a rich, stimulating environment and a reliable, supportive network of caregivers.
We hope your child will join us and step into their great potential of being exactly who they are, right now in the fresh air, in the real life of make-believe.
Two Parts of the Day
Morning
One of the advantages of a Forest Kinder-level program is a certain degree of age-mixing. Each school day, the Forest K kids free play and intermingle with the younger students. A number of opportunities can arise here: leadership roles are assumed and, over time, nurturance toward the younger set in play and other transition times begin to manifest. There is also a bi-directional effect in teaching and learning: as the 5s/6s are tasked with more explaining and directing ideas for the 3s/4s, the teachers become the learners, as numeric or phonetic concepts are given a grammatical structure and adhere. The Forest K kids also become the supervisors in the “zone of proximal development”, the long-hailed term of psychologist Lev Vygotsky, where a set of skills or activities that couldn’t be performed alone can be carried out in collaboration with others who are more skilled, creating a scaffold for the younger set to climb on and a crash course in empathy and concept synthesis for the 5s/6s.
afternoon
The remainder of the day allows for more intimate work and play when we break off from the herd. This time will include a combination of unstructured free play and teacher-facilitated projects and challenges that could span across a day, week, or month-long endeavor. Whether in free play or more adult-directed endeavors, we’ll also graze on the more traditional academic touchstones within the framework of our own pedagogical approach (detailed below).
Children learn more from what you are, than what you teach.
W.E.B. DuBois
Masters of Play
“I pretend, therefore I am. I pretend, therefore I know. I pretend, therefore I am not afraid.”
Becoming a master player is the height of developmental achievement for the kinder set. If play has been disparaged in the lay mind, research and experience have revived its significance for children. Pretend play helps kiddos consolidate their understanding of the world, nurture more complex structures of language and thought, and survey their expanding social and emotional frontiers. Children are re-creating familiar scripts from their lives, allowing them to reflect, negotiate, practice power and control, and develop a ‘concept of self’ with the corollary confidence to feel secure when anxiety or doubt creep in. Play is a guidepost for the teacher, as well: in developing their dramatic themes and characters and gravity-shaking narratives, the clued-in teacher facilitates their conversational fluency, their emergent literacy, their practice in early math or physics, with suggestions and enticements of their own; in this way, a singular ‘social curriculum’ blooms with each new crop of players.
If we give play its proper place in the kingdom of childhood, the richness of their representation (even when it doesn’t conform to our senses and proportions) will prove that acquiring mere information and a set of skills-in-isolation, is a knockoff of the enduring features of undiminished play: joy, meaning-making, active engagement, iterative experimentation, and social empowerment.
How we Practice
Ski, sled, snowshoe, and XC Ski
build dens and hovels for our stories (Language & Literacy: letter and word formation + phonemic awareness e.g. dictated stories or attempts at writing offer the visuals and power of manipulating text)
create marble chutes and other assemblies of conveyance (Science: understanding of how machines extend our ability to “do work” + to make intelligent comparisons in the design process
float boats on the creek
excavate a complete watershed in the sandpit (Math/Science: design hypotheses & investigate volume and capacity + rate of flow and systems of water catchment)
How we Grow
make meaning through stories and skills of representation
work out conflicting ideas as a means toward independent resolution
unstructured materials offer the kind of open-ended purposes for creative thinking
Ministers of Nature
“A culture is no better than its woods.”
A forest kindergarten, first and foremost, is the child’s natural habitat, a wildwood of spirit. Running and yelling are encouraged. Secret dens and wily snares are permitted (with suggestions for improvement!). The flowers and birds of the season are invited into our houses of knowing and feeling. Risk is plentiful in bite-size allotments and conflict is a mountain we like to climb. Our senses are activated because being in the outdoors, day after day, require it. We learn other languages that are borne of observation, listening, attending, and caring—observing the daily and seasonal shifts in the moods of weather, or the leave-behinds of animals; we listen before we enter the big woods, to better notice our neighbors; we attend to the needs of plants in late spring and early summer, to practice the patience and persistence of watching something (sunflower) come from almost nothing (seed); and we care for each other, the wildest and most unpredictable animals on the planet, as we learn to inhabit a place in cooperation with others, so that we may both belong and be beholden to this beautiful nest of ours.
How we Practice
follow the trail of animals by noticing patterns and clues (Gross/Fine Motor Skills: alternating controlled & strenuous movements on unevenly textured surfaces)
foraging for berries and tea using plant identification
gather fire-starting materials (Applied Math: size, shape, and geometry of a fire structure: Does it hold? Does it light quickly? Why or why not?)
observe and track the progress of a nest of robin’s eggs
doing nothing in the quiet of a sit spot
How we Grow
the daily ritual around thinking of and acting with ‘nature’ in a less instrumental fashion
authentic feelings of joy and wonder associated with a non-performative environment
weekly participation in tracking seasonal changes and the value they confer in our lives
Concepts in Context
“In his play he is no longer an onlooker merely; he is a part of the busy world of adults. He is practicing to take his place in that world when he is grown. He is getting his education.”
Your child, ambling down the trail, is stopped in her tracks by a clump of fairy slipper orchids (Calypso bulbosa) which has been identified by the group before. A teacher notices her pause and invites the child to ask a question. “How do they get so pink??” The teacher has a referent in Darwin and evolution through natural selection, but explaining this to a young child is as useful and effective as a chocolate teapot. Plus, this is an opportunity for more than just knowing the ‘right’ answer. The teacher pitches back, “Wow! They really are pink; I’ve never seen a pink quite like that in the woods before. And they’ve got all these speckles on the inside.” The child counts the speckles, gets to fourteen, and realizes the repetitive difficulty of tracking so many similar dots. “My doll at home could fit in these slippers,” she says. The teacher notices a small black fly inside the slipper. “I think our slipper has a visitor; maybe the fly is looking for something?” “He wants the slipper’s blood!” exclaims the young girl. “Yes, he’s a robber fly! This orchid must be hiding something,” says the teacher. “Okay,” begins the girl, “we need to protect these magic slippers.”
The teacher could pivot in many directions: “should we find some others, and you all could list what you need to keep these slippers safe, and I’ll transcribe your words, leaving the list on this tree for you to refer back to”; or, “you could sketch a picture of your ideas in your journal, as a rough draft, and then share it with the others so everyone knows what they should gather in their baskets.” Here we have a slew of learning territories: plant ID practice, the advent of biological processes, counting and grouping, meaning-making, building a story from small acts of attention, and emergent literacy through decoding words, noticing letters and their sounds, and experiencing the executive function of making lists and thoughtfully planning out. This could be extended and embellished for weeks if the young girl’s inner wind carried it.
A child’s knowing is embedded in their doing. In Finland, this is called ‘secret’ learning. What matters most to a young child is how they will best learn to make images and represent their ideas in progressively more nuanced and complex ways. But they must know who they are to feel most comfortable doing this, and learning in accord with love, passion, and special places and people is the context for true concept-building.
How we Practice
pretend fossil dig
preparing for an “overnight” camping trip
planning a woodland city (Social Studies: what businesses do we include? how do people get around? what basic services are available?)
improving a sledding surface (Science: strengthening critical reasoning and analysis through trial and error + experimenting with snow density & concepts of countervailing force)
riffing on and representing a friend’s story (Language & Literacy: journaling or drawing in different consistencies e.g. sand, mud, homemade charcoal, etc.)
How we Grow
teacher and peer scaffolding support
a journal for keeping curiosities close at hand (Fine Motor/Writing: pencil-grip using different media, connecting pictures and objects to letters and words)
a structure that falls, then breaks, gets re-evaluated, and finally stands!
Give the children love, more love and still more love – and the common sense will come by itself.
Astrid Lindgren
World of Work
“How would the painter or poet express anything other than his encounter with the world?”
With a growing sense of power, and a realization of what the sense machine of the body is capable of, a young child is interested in climbing two of the sturdiest branches at a Forest Kindergarten: 1) concrete and direct involvement with the material world, and 2) making socially necessary contributions with real effects, feeling responsible to people outside the family.
The renowned Finnish architect, Juhani Pallasmaa, explains how this engagement with materiality builds in us an integration of our different abilities: “Touch is the sensory mode that integrates our experience of the world with that of ourselves…when working, both the artist and craftsman are directly engaged with their bodies and their existential experiences rather than focused on an external and objectified problem…creative work calls for a bodily and mental identification, empathy and compassion.” What kind of encounters can our children have with their material surroundings that introduces them to the softness and hardness of wood, recognizing the dullness of a tool and learning how to sharpen it, the subtle motions in snaking a needle through fabric, making their own clay to then make their own figures?
As kindergarteners grow in age and size and thought, they want to know how this material engagement impacts, well, anything! They, too, want to be relied upon as they learn to bridle all their muscle and might into responsible and necessary ways to be useful and of service to their friends and community. We can tackle this in a few different ways: creating a new job board each month, in work circles, with real work to be done, not the simulacra of the younger years. Making the dough for stick bread during snack, or cutting the cucumbers, helps everyone eat. Or at the work bench, carving wood with tools to festoon their play with small fantasy characters, animals, or shapes.
How we Practice
role as the snack leader (Math: 1:1 counting correspondence, beginning skip counting e.g. 2,4,6) + (Home Economics: making and shaping dough for snobrød!)
snitte: the Danish practice of carving and whittling wood (Social Studies: where is wood used and for what reasons?)
feeding and filling water for the chickens or pigs or sheep
washing up the mud kitchen
organizing tools and loose parts
How we Grow
standards of craft and work
finding novel ways to accept failure and persevere thereafter
building on iterative work in the designing, planning, and creating process (Executive Function: using working memory and flexible thinking to streamline processes of work OR abandon a desired end to seize a spontaneous observation)
Big Heart, Calm Mind
“If you are good, life is good.”
The mechanics of attention begin to change in kindergarten. Children begin the long and slow process of honing their concentration, of perceiving farther and with greater clarity through a more focused beam of light. Their brains grow for more depth and less breadth. But as attention has emerged as our most precious and vital resource, children are just beginning to learn how to build a reliable vessel that can stay afloat atop the “ocean of emotion” and direct their attention in healthy and well-adjusted ways. They can just as easily fall prey to words, images, and behaviors that foster the illusions of self as that of their adult caregivers. As educators and caregivers, the list of what should be known and acquired balloons each year. But what have we lost by foregoing the mastery of ourselves? As kindergarteners are building language and literacy faculties, we should make front and center the conversation they have with themselves.
A student of any age can benefit from a consistent practice. But beginning early on sets in motion the precepts in which kindness is its own broad curriculum and empathy is as important a gift as anything newly-capable hands could wittle or shape. A practice that comes in different forms and in different moments of the day:
How we Practice
“Sharing in a feeling” allows us to see how much support we are given and the support we have to offer. A Western Zen monk has said, “Compassion is a posture.” How a teacher addresses a student, how we acknowledge and validate their perspectives, how students begin to know each other intimately in their ho-hum relations—all bring us closer.
‘O snail / climb Mt. Fuji / but slowly, slowly.’ This haiku by Kobayashi Issa tells us to take the long view. Every day of school, we commit to a small practice…inviting the bell and following our breath during a morning circle; walking to the gate with a “Thanks in Every Step” practice. Many options. Consistently and patiently.
a sit spot where we practice noticing: the rain, a new larva, the edge or color of a pebble. As we notice more and more outside of us, we begin to do the same inwardly, for when storm clouds gather or the sun is brightest in our interior skies. We can write or draw our observations, or we can simply log them as ephemeral moments, and continue noticing.
an insult we receive, or a feeling of exclusion, is an opportunity for practice, too. Our breath is a calm conductor, leading our train along every twist and turn and trundle, while remaining on the track. Sharing in a story about these moments helps create a useful fiction for the child to engage in a discovery process, to recognize and accept the feelings of a third-person character and identify with them. Together, it is easier to tackle an appropriate response.
How we Grow
build an architecture of emotional intelligence to effectively address adverse experiences
become familiar with failure and non-attachment so “possessed” things lost don’t hold their sting
the high-frequency of noticing, e.g. ourselves, our environment, each other, will disentangle us from certain prickly emotions
But real life is only one kind of life—there is also the life of the imagination.
E.B. White
