It’s been a busy week at our house. Last week, our preschool teacher let me know about a former colleague who was interested in starting a forest kindergarten. A forest kindergarten or Waldkinder is a concept that comes from Europe and is becoming increasingly popular in North America. Basically, children head outdoors in the morning and don’t come back until afternoon. They bring equipment to investigate natural places, they build forts, they even help build fires and cook over them. It’s a different sort of way to spend your kindergarten year, far from the pressures of the academic classroom.
The idea behind forest kindergartens is actually fairly old. The original idea behind kindergarten was to create a space where children would be able to play together, ideally in the outdoors, with a minimum of heavy academics. Somehow this idea morphed into the more focused academic kindergartens of today. Yet in my father’s time, kindergarten was neither mandatory nor did many children actually attend. He’s an excellent reader and a good person with a degree. It didn’t matter.
Children now watch hours of television every day, a respite from homework and the school classroom. When they are not watching television they are plugged in to video games. We cajole children to go outside, yet often we are too afraid to let them play, both for reasons of safety and out of feelings that they would be better off doing homework.
Literacy is important, but it will come in time. A connection to the natural world and a feeling of solid connection with something good and healthy is also vital and often missing in our school system. Forest kindergartens are a small step in reclaiming the childhood that seems to be lost to many small children today, and I’m happy to be trying to build one in our local neighborhood, even if the task seems daunting.