Old school bus serves as nature preschool in Dallas
The Dallas Morning News
DALLAS—"Let's go, let's go," the girls shouted, skipping down a dirt path and through the prairie grass, still damp from morning dew.
The Dallas Morning News reports an anthill stopped them in their tracks.
"They're so cute," said 3-yearold Inez Beltran as she and other preschool students crouched low, peering at the insect specks crawling up and down the dirt heap.
Their teacher, Jennifer Stuart, followed behind, reminding them not to "squish" the bugs.
"We forgot to read our code of kindness," she said.
This blackland prairie is an outdoor classroom for Seed Preschool—a nature-based program that meets twice a week in an old school bus parked at Twelve Hills Nature Center in Oak Cliff. Stuart, a volunteer at the nonprofit urban nature preserve, recently launched the preschool on wheels.
Here, you won't find desks or chalkboards.
Stuart painted her "magic school bus," named Matilda, green and blue with yellow flowers. Inside, she gutted most of the seats. She covered the worn bus floor in rainbow-colored rugs, stacked children's books on a shelf and potted a leafy tomato plant in the corner, crossing her fingers that it—and her latest endeavor—thrives.
This bus that once shuttled children to and from school now is the home base for the nature preschool.
"This kind of reminds me of those hippie schools they used to have," Deborah Beltran said after dropping off her granddaughter Inez for the school's first day.
The school is one of several similar programs that have sprouted in North Texas. Others include the Blackland Prairie Conservatory & Atelier in Lake Highlands, River Legacy Nature School in Arlington and Mud Puddles and Dandelions Nature Preschool in Collin County.
"They need it. Children spend so much time indoors," said Stuart, who founded a nonprofit preschool called The Community School of the Park Cities in 2000 when her now teenage daughter was a baby.
In Europe, such programs and forest kindergartens have been popular for decades. Now, these schools are being planted in the U.S. In 2013, a kindergarten teacher in Vermont, for example, pitched an idea to take her students into the woods for an entire day once a week, sparking a small movement among educators to take students outdoors.
"They need to know what dirt and mud feel like and what bugs sound like as they're flying around," Stuart said.
And research shows it could be good for kids. The list of benefits is lengthy, citing nature as important to children's development, supportive of creativity and problem-solving, increasing science test scores, improving self-discipline and reducing symptoms of attention-deficit disorder in children as young as 5.
The National Association for the Education of Young Children also has noticed an increased interest in nature-based schools, though they don't have specific numbers, deputy executive director Marica Cox Mitchell said. The Natural Start Alliance—a coalition of educators, parents and environmental organizations—counts nearly 250 nature preschools in the U.S.
"We've reached some saturation of screen time and indoor time," Stuart said. "People are starting to rebel a bit against that and reclaim the outdoors."
With only three students enrolled, the program is small, but Stuart is hopeful for growth. When she launched The Community School of the Park Cities in 2000, she led enrollment from 10 to more than 70 in its first year. With her new program, there are plans to incubate chicken eggs, build a native bee habitat, chronicle nature walks in journals and plant a small vegetable garden.
"We're going to grow some food and learn that you can eat something that you grew and that food just doesn't come from the shelf in the store," she said.