Submitted photo
Children catch butterflies during a day at the Forest Lake Area Schools’ Nature Preschool, an outdoor-focused preschool on the grounds of the Wargo Nature Center in Lino Lakes. All of the district’s preschools include a focus on outdoor play and learning.
“When you look at traditional classrooms, it’s almost like they’re invented to make parents think they’re cute,” said Cheryl Smoczyk, early childhood support manager at Forest Lake Area Schools. Bright colors are everywhere, and stereotypical “kid stuff” lines the walls.
However, she said, the Forest Lake district preschools don’t follow convention. When kids are inside, their classrooms are painted to look more earthy and natural, and students spend much of their days outdoors. The district’s early childhood educators believe that nature is the perfect learning environment for young children, a philosophy in line with the districtwide move to a nature focus seven years ago.
In 2007, the district created a certified nature explorer site at the Family Center in Forest Lake, an outdoor space that includes areas for kids to create, learn and play, all while using natural materials. About five years ago, the district partnered with the Wargo Nature Center in Lino Lakes to create a nature preschool, in which kids – usually from Forest Lake or Lino Lakes, but sometimes from as far away as Wyoming – learn while out in the park. Though that preschool class has a naturalist on staff along with the licensed preschool education and paraprofessional, Smoczyk remarked that the philosophy of the classroom is the same as the other preschool groups in the district.
“All of our programs have that nature focus,” she said.
She used the example of unstructured play, a goal in traditional preschool environments. In the FLASD’s nature-focused classrooms, students might play outdoors in an area where educators have left a ready supply of sticks or larger pieces of wood.
“The very first objective in preschool is a social and emotional one, with cooperation with peers,” Smoczyk said. “Often, children want to move those pieces as part of their play.”
In moving the wood and stacking it to make forts or other structures, she explained, the children learn cooperation and leadership. Similarly, students have art time as they would in a traditional preschool class, but the art materials might be pinecones and bird seed instead of markers, and their canvas might be snow instead of construction paper. In these ways, the preschool programs teach children traditional concepts in a nontraditional way – along with teaching them concepts like osmosis, ecology and other science topics they might not otherwise know so early in life.
Though children are learning many of the same things in nature-focused preschool as they would in a traditional environment, Smoczyk said there are added benefits to the outdoor emphasis.
“We really bought into the research that says children need natural materials to work with,” she said.
With autism diagnoses on the rise and kids getting more screen time and less outdoor time in their everyday lives, Forest Lake educators felt that a shift to outdoor learning would provide a peaceful, interesting environment to engage kids in ways that already match their interests, improving their motor skills, creativity, critical thinking and more.
“The outdoor environment provides a calming experience for almost everyone,” Smoczyk noted.
Parents have seen the results. District officials have published a study collecting observations by preschoolers’ parents of the benefits outdoor activities and learning have had on their kids. The study is available at tinyurl.com/mjzx9jj.
Preschool starts soon, but parents can still register their kids until orientation day on Sept. 10. In addition to the one class of 15 4- and 5-year-olds at Wargo, there are a number of other classes at the early childhood center (200 Fourth St. SW in Forest Lake) and some at the Lino Lakes, Linwood and Wyoming elementary schools. Visit flaschools.org/ce or call 651-982-8300 for more information.