Forest Preschools

Preschools in forests take root in the US

If you are interested in the idea of sending your preschooler to a natural environment click "Preschools" above to read full news article

Though I didn't send my older children to a "forest Preschool" because mostly they didn't exist in the late 1970s, still I spent as much time in the wilderness and nature with them as possible. And even (using Oak Meadow School as independent study for homeschooling) lived 10 miles from the nearest small town in the wilderness on 2 1/2 acres and let them help me build an A-Frame that we lived in for 4 years and it became our vacation cabin once we moved to the San Francisco Bay area and bought another business. So I have had a lot of experience introducing my children from birth to age 12 especially to the Wilderness. My oldest Stepson was very interested in the Audubon Society through his Grandmother and created life lists of every bird he saw. In fact, once at Tule Lake north east of Mt. Shasta during the Winter and he pointed and said, "That's an immature White Pelican." So his mother and I just laughed because what would a pelican be doing so far from the ocean in the winter? However, when we returned home to our A-Frame on the side of Mt. Shasta we looked in an Audubon Bird book and sure enough it actually was an immature white pelican in Tule Lake while it was snowing. Where we lived there were "Fairydidles"(flying Squirrels) that stood upside down on the side of huge Port Orford Cedars and scolded us with their chirps as we walked by to the point where there was nothing left to do but just laugh at their chirping at us to leave the forest and them. They would do this for ten to fifteen minutes until we left. I thought about this later and realized it was actually a really great survival strategy in the forest for them because they did this at 15 feet up the tree where nothing could get at them. Later we saw them fly from tree to tree.