New Calgary kindergarten sends kids to explore the great outdoors
Program has young students spending most of day in Lloyd Park
Earlier this year, ParticipACTION released a report card on the state of physical activity for children in Canada. The report was titled The Biggest Risk is Keeping Kids Indoors.
The conclusion of this report is fairly obvious from the title and hardly comes as a surprise, given the constant worry that kids are spending too much time in front of screens.
Starting in September, Calgary parents will have a new way to ensure their kids are getting time to play outdoors.
The Children’s Commons Ecological Society is launching a nature kindergarten. This full- day kindergarten program, which has been approved by Alberta Education, has kids spending most of their day exploring outside in Lloyd Park.
Kristi Kraychy, a former teacher and board member for the Children’s Commons Ecological Society, says that the kids will begin their day in a group, planning some of the things they’d like to do before they start exploring the wilderness.
“Then it’s just sort of whatever pops up,” Kraychy said.
“So ... if it’s a rainy day, maybe a child finds a worm. Then that child kind of begins to ask his teacher or his facilitator about the worms, and then they all begin a dialogue ... most often the other children will join in, just because that first child’s so enthusiastic about it, and then as a group they’ll probably decide they want to count the number of worms or collect the worms and now they’re adding and they’re recording the numbers in their field journals, so that’s how they’re sort of starting to translate the Alberta curriculum.”
This approach to teaching and learning is based on the forest school philosophy, a European import to Canada with strong ties in the United Kingdom.
Lisa Menzies is a Master of Education student, and soon to be one of the first Canadian- trained forest school practitioners. She’s also the co- founder of Common Digs, a Calgary organization that aims to get people outside and in the dirt.
She and Wendy Yuen, the other half of the founding team for Common Digs, helped create the Children’s Commons Ecological Society, a non- profit, to run the kindergarten program. Common Digs currently runs summer camps, urban farming projects, and a forest school for preschoolers.
Menzies said that one of the keys to the forest school philosophy is teaching risk.
“A lot of people think forest school is taking children out into the woods, well it’s not what we do, we always do a risk benefit assessment ... so you’re looking at, if a child’s going to climb a tree ... how are we going to help a child go through that process of risk evaluation to decide if that tree they’re climbing is a safe tree to climb?” Menzies said.
“So it isn’t about letting children run wild and you’re letting them take risks in a managed way.”
Based on the experiences of other Canadian nature kindergartens, these kids will have little trouble transitioning to a traditional classroom for Grade 1. In fact, they may even be better prepared.
“The transitions are fine, the children are doing very well. They’re actually quite socially confident and they’re also quite confident in terms of taking charge of their own learning, because they’ve had all this experience being in charge of the curriculum themselves, so they love learning,” Kraychy said.
Both Kraychy and Menzies said they’ve already had parents ask if they plan to expand the program to other elementary grades. Kraychy’s two kids will both be enrolled in the forest school preschool in the fall and she said she hopes they can continue their nature- based learning.
The kindergarten’s home is Lloyd Park, a 23- hectare membership park in south Calgary, where Common Digs runs its preschool and summer camps. The kids will use a nearby school for indoor activities.
The class is capped at 18 students and Kraychy says they hope to have enough kids enrolled for two classes in the fall. The program isn’t tied to a specific school board, so anyone from Calgary and the surrounding areas can apply for a spot. Classes are Monday, Wednesday and every other Friday from 9 a. m. to 3 p. m.
Kids will be supervised by a board- certified kindergarten teacher and an early childhood education facilitator.