Outdoor 'Forest School' Movement Alive And Growing In Westchester

WESTCHESTER COUNTY, NY — Eric Stone had a vision: bringing the international forest school movement to his native Westchester County. In the past seven years, the school he co-founded has grown in size and scope.

Since 2016, the Rewilding School has been offering hands-on experiences in which children play and learn outside — an alternative to the desks-in-a-row factory model of early childhood education.

"There’s an element to children's education that’s very controlled," Stone told Patch. "On the flip side of that, people are seeing a way forward to giving kids a toolkit to explore and be creative and build their ability to function and make decisions."

Its flagship program is the Forest Preschool, and its other programs include Wild Ones for toddlers and caregivers, Weekend Hunter Gatherers, a Nature Club. It also runs a Roots program that focuses on providing education and opportunity to the BIPOC community that is often not given access to the ancestral skills they cultivated on this land.

Being an outdoor educator is quite different than being a classroom teacher, Stone said. "The environment naturally lends itself to exploration as the primary mode of learning. As a teacher you can spend a lot of time putting together an amazing lesson plan but you come across a box turtle walking across a trail and this is the lesson now. This is the most interesting thing around."

Those little teachable moments may originate with the teacher or with the kids themselves, he said. "They have the freedom to pursue interests. We give them large blocks of time to pursue learning through play."

It also enhances the students' ability to build social bonds.

"This trend for pushing for writing and literacy earlier and earlier works for some, but not all kids," he said. "Plus, all kids benefit from more exposure to social situations."

According to the BBC, nature schools were first developed in Denmark in the 1950s and have proliferated in Europe and Asia. In South Korea, it's a national initiative.

Research has found a variety of benefits, including:

• Enhancing brain development
• Improving academic performance
• Providing mental health benefits
• Reducing symptoms of ADHD
• Providing therapeutic benefits to children with autism
• Promoting physical activity and motor development
• Promoting emotional resilience and self-regulation
• Enhancing communication
• Promoting executive function

Stone, who attended Lakeland schools, started the program with his partner Megan Cohen in 2016 after several years of working in outdoor education.

He knew lots of kids who wanted to be outdoors. "But the tradition of outdoor play had been interrupted," he said.

"I spent a couple of years traveling around the country working at nature camps and alternative schools. Thankfully, I had some great mentors here at home and at college. When I came back I was able to hit the ground running."

He met parents who wanted to see their children outdoors, wanted to give them freedom and opportunities to learn through play in a safe and supervised environment.

"We started off with our parent-child programs and our summer programs for school-age kids and then it expanded to include forest preschool at two different locations," he said.

Stone, his team, and the families in his programs are not alone in seeking the benefits of outdoor education. Forest schools and nature preschools are rapidly expanding in America, according to new research from the Natural Start Alliance.

"The U.S. early care and education system has developed over decades on the broad premise that learning primarily happens indoors, with the outdoors being used for required breaks, especially providing opportunities for gross motor development. Nature preschools have flipped this model, with the outdoors as a primary learning space and the indoors as a secondary space, which in some cases is not used at all," the Alliance said in its new report, "Nature Preschools in the United States: 2022 Survey."

"The researchers conclude that nature both provides a rich setting for learning (for example, by plentiful opportunities for beneficial forms of play) and positively affects learners (for example, by lowering stress and promoting attention)," the Alliance report states. "The benefits of nature for children’s healthy development — physically, mentally, and emotionally — are now well documented, and as a result, schools across the United States are taking young children outside to capitalize on nature as a low-cost, high-impact educational intervention."

In fact, several states are moving to update licensing requirements, according to an article in the Washington Post produced by the Hechinger Report.

The number of forest schools has risen by 300 percent in 13 years. In the last school year, there were an estimated 800 nature preschools in the U.S. serving 25,600 children, the Alliance said.

"There’s all kinds of parents here in the States and I think it’s important to have options for kids," Stone said. "We do have a lot of different approaches to children's education."

In Westchester, the Rewilding School staff's mission is to connect children and families to the natural world.

"Forest School in and of itself has some basic premises, and we borrow from a bunch of different methodologies," Stone explained. "We follow the principle where you have trained educators in a natural environment with kids who have agency over their learning."

The school has programs in Croton-on-Hudson and Mount Kisco. It works with conservation partners at Saw Mill River Audubon, Westchester County Parks, the Marsh Sanctuary and the Somers Land Trust. It serves 600-800 children a year, whether it be every day or just a birthday party.

The staff comes from a variety of backgrounds. Some are licensed teachers or pursuing teaching degrees. Some come from the outdoor ed world, others from coaching or wilderness guide backgrounds.

"We want them to be able to show our students that the outdoors is something to work with and work in and that outdoors is not something to be scared of or shy away from, even the bad weather days," Stone said. "At this point, some of our staff are even former campers."

You can see the program for yourself at the school's fall festival on Saturday.

Prospective parents often ask Stone, "What do they do when it rains?" he said. "Catch some raindrops in your mouth. Stomp in some puddles. It ends up being a really magical time."