cool idea. I think we have one here in San Francisco. I just wonder about rain/snow (for some areas) and then naps..where do they take them? But in general I think the kids (and adults) need more outdoor time
There is a lot of gear involved... our son wears long underwear, wool socks, proper rain jacket / pants...and we're in a relatively mild climate. I think that's one of the benefits though - it teaches kids that crap weather doesn't mean you can't go outside and play, you just need to be prepared.
As far as naps - our kiddo doesn't take a nap anymore, so it isn't an issue. Younger classes typically get out earlier, so you could do a nap then. I'm not sure there are any all day outdoor preschools....
That is exactly what we would need for our son if we sent him to preschool in southern China (maybe not the rain jacket) simply given the lack of indoor heating (we will wait till he is older).
I remember when I was a kid we were spending 6-7 hours playing in the snow. In the evening we'd come home and there was ice on our clothes, shoes and socks. Wasn't a problem. We'd jump off the clothes and take a hot shower or drink some hot tea. Good times. Kids are very resilient. While it was really cold outside the energy generated from our play would warm us up all-right.
That seems like a good question. From the article:
> There, with temperatures hovering around 40 degrees Fahrenheit, Rose and her 13 classmates are huddled together under a tarp hung among trees, learning to make cedar tea.
Yeah, that's hypothermia weather. Get a bit wet in that and you're going to be really, really miserable.
I love being outdoors, but 5C and rain is the worst. I much prefer snow and a bit of sunshine.
This is nice if you live in a nice cool place with a magical shady forest full of wonders, but in most places kids will be in sweltering heat with the sun beating down on them all day putting them at risk for melanoma. I hated recess because of this, I just did not see the allure of being outside.
We have outdoor preschools in Seattle, but because of how licensing works, my family can't use them. Outdoor preschools can only run for 4 hours usually 9:30-1:30, instead of full day, which is really what you need if you have two working parents.
Do you happen to know what the licensing problems are? My family is in exactly the same boat; I'd love to be able to complain constructively to DYCF about which of their rules is responsible for preventing us from using a program like Fiddleheads.
>(6) Licensed outdoor play areas must be enclosed with a fence or barrier that is intended to prevent children from exiting and discourages climbing. If the outdoor play area is enclosed by a barrier that is not a fence, the barrier may be a wall constructed with brick, stone, or a similar material.
For some background a co-worker's wife works at one of the outdoor preschools and said that in order to be full time you have to have a fence in play space next to the indoor school.
We had outdoor school in the (I think it was) 6th grade when I was a kid. This would have been early 90s. 4.5 days, slept in cabins. Parents came to visit on just one of the days. It rained. It was muddy. We got cold. But we learned a lot.
It'd be interesting to see if children raised with outdoor preschools had better eyesight. There's a strong correlation between time spend indoors during childhood and nearsightedness. [1]
I haven't looked into it enough to know how "out there" this idea is, but I think I've read that there seems to be a correlation between lack of UV exposure and myopia.
Glass blocks UV. Which means people are getting next to zero UV exposure indoors, even if the room is brightly lit.
The past few years, we've been keeping out windows open basically from the time it's warm enough in the spring to when it starts getting too cold in the fall. We ran our AC for maybe a week total this summer.
Anyway, where I'm getting at with this is since our windows are open, we should be getting significantly more UV exposure, even when indoors. I wonder if the rise of air conditioning did a double hit to people's eyesight by both 1. Keeping them inside more often and 2. Leading to people closing their windows, which blocks UV exposure.
I got my eyes checked last time I was back in the UK because it's cheaper to get new glasses there than in NZ. My prescription has dropped from about -5 to -4 since the last checkup. The optometrist was surprised as 'that never happens', but her theory is that a decade of living in a country with higher UV exposure is the cause.
There's other quality-of-life improvements I could peg on catching more sun (better mood, alertness) but there's downsides as well (melanoma risk++).
No, I generally spend more time here outdoors. Mostly because spring/summer/autumn has a greater portion of time where being outdoors is easy, versus a shorter period in the UK.
On top of that though, I'm spending less time in built-up/shaded areas just because there's fewer of them to be found here.
All of it's nudging-the-needle kinda change, my lifestyle isn't vastly different to how it was.
Related, Governors Island in NYC has a huge area called 'The Yard' [0] that's full of.. random hunks of wood and metal, pallets, rope, random tires and broken appliances. All for kids to play around in. It's just stuff a normal kid in a big city wouldn't get exposed to.
Maybe you live in more upscale cities than me but that all looks like commonly discarded stuff that some kids walking home from school would play with if they came across it.
My son goes to one of these. We moved him out of another (indoor) preschool. He loves it - the kids seem to get along better, he's been more well behaved, and it seems to foster his creativity. That said, he's also older now! But we've had a great experience.
You're forgetting about all the other kids in the outdoor kindergarten systems around the world. I'm sure he enrolled his son into it after learning about their success.
This is such a completely fantastic idea. It would expose kids to exercise, sunlight, allergens, and germs. All things scientific theories like the hygiene hypothesis and vitamin d as a marker of outside exposure are telling us are vital to making a healthy child.
Let's not forget cataracts, which are much more common in equatorial regions, even among people whose skin pigment helps protect them from skin cancers.
You are aware that you can easily access shade in the great outdoors? Literally, the pictures in the linked article show adults and kids seated in the shade in a wooded area.
And in the summer you can wear loose clothing that covers the body instead of t-shirts and shorts. A tunic not only protects against sunburn, it is also more comfortable in the sun.
I'm old enough to remember a time when both parents didn't work full time and the other parents in the neighborhood helped watch each others children from time to time.
It didn't cost much money, and the part time wages were plenty to cover a lot of expenses. Unfortunately, the value of our money was destroyed by politicians, and wages have been depressed for several decades due to economic policies in place.
I hear this sentiment a lot, but as someone living the "one breadwinner, wife and three kids" life, it seems completely doable on tech job wages.
You just have to adjust your lifestyle somewhat. People talk about how you used to be able to live on much less money, but they forget all the added conveniences people have.
For example, my Grandma stayed home with my Dad and his seven siblings. But they also had an outhouse until he was in junior high. They also had a garden and lots of DIY improvisation knowledge.
The way I like to think of my current family situation is that instead of calling my wife a "homemaker" or something traditional like that, I say she's "financially independent". We have enough money that she doesn't have to work. So she doesn't. So what if I have to work. We're halfway to freedom.
The average tech wage today is comparable to everyone's average household income in 1980, relative to median home price in the US. Compare the S&P 500 relative to median income and we're even worse off.
On one hand, working in the tech sector is not a bad place to be. On the other hand, we're no better off than the average person in 1980, relative to their peers. Minimum wage was $3.10 in 1980, it's just $7.25 today (federal). Seems we've done everything we can to destroy domestic labor over the last 40 years.
Maybe because I graduated college / entered the workforce through the peak of the recession, but I've found that I tend not to compare my living standard with those I grew up in nor those that my parents grew up in.
Yes, I think we probably took several wrong turns along the way, but here is where we are, and I find that I am much more content with things if I just accept right now as my baseline. Compared to many (most?) of the people I associate with, I'm doing pretty darn well.
When women entered the workforce en masse you had say 60% more workers, but still the same number of jobs. * That's around when wage stagnation started and seems to explain a lot of it. The answer should have been a shorter work week, more maternity/paternity leave, etc.
* Of course some other jobs were created in the process, like more caretaker jobs, and other stuff happened like more automation.
I believe that the best part about these schools is that early on they explicitly teach teamwork and understanding limits. It's quite shocking culturally seeing kids whittling with sharp knives and climbing rather precarious trees but it seems to work well.
Kansas has outdoors. Might not have forests, but there is still benefit from being outside. I think they are called Forest Schools because they started in Europe / Scandinavia, which are forested places. Doesn't seem like there is any reason the concept couldn't be adapted to other climates.
I think "forest school" is kind of a mistranslation of the German "Waldkindergarten." "Wald" is strictly "forest" but idiomatically means the great outdoors, the wilds. Kind of a similar confounding as the word for woman and wife being the same.
This said, I wish there was more exploration beyond Northern Europe and North America. Speaking just from anecdotes, in areas of the global south (India), there's seemingly a huge drive for families (and thus school) be more oriented around their kids developing skills for marketability. Not trying to assert there's anything wrong with that given wealth inequality, though in thinking of examples of the counter Manish Jain comes to mind: https://schoolingtheworld.org/
It's pretty common in Northern European countries too - even in winter. On a sunny winters day when it's -20C it's perfectly comfortable with the right clothing and footwear (which isn't expensive).
I went to a Norwegian preschool. And it was almost an outdoor school. Everyday we would go on long walks and activities in the woods. We would learn how to have fun in the rain with buckets and puddles. That didn't mean there weren't indoor activities, but we did a good mix.
If you're interested, it's also worth looking at Erin Kenny's book "Forest Kindergardens: The Cedarsong Way." She founded the first one in the Seattle area out on Vashon Island and has been the model for the others that have sprung up since then.
My wife couldn't find one on Bainbridge Island where we until recently lived, so she just started an all weather outdoor group herself. People showed up in the summer and fall. In the middle of winter it was often just her and our two kids in full rain gear splashing around the beaches.
Interesting that the article treats this as a ‘trend’—but doesn’t mention Waldorf schools, which have done this around the world for 100 years. When my daughter attended Waldorf preschool, she spent the majority of her day outdoors. All year round.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadSounds like more worthwhile learning opportunities to me! I really dig this idea
As far as naps - our kiddo doesn't take a nap anymore, so it isn't an issue. Younger classes typically get out earlier, so you could do a nap then. I'm not sure there are any all day outdoor preschools....
> There, with temperatures hovering around 40 degrees Fahrenheit, Rose and her 13 classmates are huddled together under a tarp hung among trees, learning to make cedar tea.
Yeah, that's hypothermia weather. Get a bit wet in that and you're going to be really, really miserable.
I love being outdoors, but 5C and rain is the worst. I much prefer snow and a bit of sunshine.
https://app.leg.wa.gov/wac/default.aspx?cite=110-300&full=tr...
>(6) Licensed outdoor play areas must be enclosed with a fence or barrier that is intended to prevent children from exiting and discourages climbing. If the outdoor play area is enclosed by a barrier that is not a fence, the barrier may be a wall constructed with brick, stone, or a similar material.
For some background a co-worker's wife works at one of the outdoor preschools and said that in order to be full time you have to have a fence in play space next to the indoor school.
It was a good time.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/scin.559183...
Glass blocks UV. Which means people are getting next to zero UV exposure indoors, even if the room is brightly lit.
The past few years, we've been keeping out windows open basically from the time it's warm enough in the spring to when it starts getting too cold in the fall. We ran our AC for maybe a week total this summer.
Anyway, where I'm getting at with this is since our windows are open, we should be getting significantly more UV exposure, even when indoors. I wonder if the rise of air conditioning did a double hit to people's eyesight by both 1. Keeping them inside more often and 2. Leading to people closing their windows, which blocks UV exposure.
Anyway, a though I had the other day.
I got my eyes checked last time I was back in the UK because it's cheaper to get new glasses there than in NZ. My prescription has dropped from about -5 to -4 since the last checkup. The optometrist was surprised as 'that never happens', but her theory is that a decade of living in a country with higher UV exposure is the cause.
There's other quality-of-life improvements I could peg on catching more sun (better mood, alertness) but there's downsides as well (melanoma risk++).
(Asking as someone living in the UK noticing his eyesight getting a little worse every year)
On top of that though, I'm spending less time in built-up/shaded areas just because there's fewer of them to be found here.
All of it's nudging-the-needle kinda change, my lifestyle isn't vastly different to how it was.
[0] https://govisland.com/things-to-do/programs/playgroundnycs-t...
Skin cancer, much?
Maybe in Norway this makes sense.
For fair skinned people in lower latitudes, maybe not.
I try to share this article as much as I can. It’s likely much of what we think we know about sun exposure is very wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_cancer_in_Australia
for example.
It didn't cost much money, and the part time wages were plenty to cover a lot of expenses. Unfortunately, the value of our money was destroyed by politicians, and wages have been depressed for several decades due to economic policies in place.
You just have to adjust your lifestyle somewhat. People talk about how you used to be able to live on much less money, but they forget all the added conveniences people have.
For example, my Grandma stayed home with my Dad and his seven siblings. But they also had an outhouse until he was in junior high. They also had a garden and lots of DIY improvisation knowledge.
The way I like to think of my current family situation is that instead of calling my wife a "homemaker" or something traditional like that, I say she's "financially independent". We have enough money that she doesn't have to work. So she doesn't. So what if I have to work. We're halfway to freedom.
On one hand, working in the tech sector is not a bad place to be. On the other hand, we're no better off than the average person in 1980, relative to their peers. Minimum wage was $3.10 in 1980, it's just $7.25 today (federal). Seems we've done everything we can to destroy domestic labor over the last 40 years.
Yes, I think we probably took several wrong turns along the way, but here is where we are, and I find that I am much more content with things if I just accept right now as my baseline. Compared to many (most?) of the people I associate with, I'm doing pretty darn well.
* Of course some other jobs were created in the process, like more caretaker jobs, and other stuff happened like more automation.
This is a very concise (11:32) video that goes over some of the culture and thinking around outdoor kindergartens.
I believe that it is quite informative:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jkiij9dJfcw&feature=youtu.be
I believe that the best part about these schools is that early on they explicitly teach teamwork and understanding limits. It's quite shocking culturally seeing kids whittling with sharp knives and climbing rather precarious trees but it seems to work well.
This said, I wish there was more exploration beyond Northern Europe and North America. Speaking just from anecdotes, in areas of the global south (India), there's seemingly a huge drive for families (and thus school) be more oriented around their kids developing skills for marketability. Not trying to assert there's anything wrong with that given wealth inequality, though in thinking of examples of the counter Manish Jain comes to mind: https://schoolingtheworld.org/
I find it mind-blowing how much more we learn when outside mainstream education, which constrains us.
I've compiled many videos and links on it, as well as some of my thoughts, in this blog entry: http://joshuaspodek.com/mind-blowing-educational-practices.
Peter Gray's book Free to Learn is the most comprehensive resource http://www.freetolearnbook.com.
Waldkrippe and Waldkindergarten
[0] - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/DACH
My wife couldn't find one on Bainbridge Island where we until recently lived, so she just started an all weather outdoor group herself. People showed up in the summer and fall. In the middle of winter it was often just her and our two kids in full rain gear splashing around the beaches.