Outdoor Education
Why is Shining Star Waldorf school so vitally invested in outdoor education?
The school founder Marsha Johnson was born in Port Angeles Washington in the 1950s and behind her family home was a fence with a gate that when opened led to the very foothills of the Olympic national Forest. Just across the gravel Road where the vast lands of undeveloped woods and Meadows and forest of the Pacific Northwest Maritime climate. Later in life as a teacher and parent, she encountered the books of Scandinave Helle He ke, Leah and outdoor endorsing author, Louv, who wrote the Last Child in the Woods.
The need for children to spend time in unstructured wilderness became a priority for her and in the founding of Shining Star Waldorf School in 2003 she was determined to introduce more outdoor educational opportunities for young children in the Portland metro area. The first thing that was begun was the establishment of an outdoor kindergarten program at Tryon community farm in 2006 called the Mother Earth Kindergarten which quickly attracted a large following. The children who attended this program were noticeably different in their behaviors and observations and maturity and comfort level with being outside. When they transitioned into the first grade into a more typical classroom they were enhanced in their capacities and self-esteem. At Shining Star we now fill this vital need for students to be outdoors with our Osoberry Kindergarten which spends each day outside exploring and growing in nature.
Shining Star established a full day outdoors with our Nature Immersion program. The goal of the program was for children in grades 1 to 8 to spend one full day every week, outdoors year-round in all of the seasons and all sorts of locations where we could find unstructured wild. We saw areas that had wild spaces sometimes with creeks or riverbanks and woods and beaches and Meadows and forests.
Our nature programs avoid over scheduling children during the day and follow a Waldorf rhythm invented for outside, starting with a large circle, singing, poetry, and games or stories that lead us into the day. It was not a scientific course to teach the Latin names of plants, nor was it a survival game type plan where humans were pitted one another to see who would survive the apocalyptic games.
Children are very creative and inventive, and unstructured time in nature provides them both food for their thinking and their imagination along with the freedom to play out those imaginations as children will in their own time. Certain activities are particularly popular say the making of homemade blackberry jam, or collecting edible foods from the forest or the construction and building of projects, using fallen timber or rocks or stones to create all kinds of things and interact with creeks, water and trees. Most importantly children form authentic interactions based on their own intuition and observations of what is around them.
In today’s world, it’s very hard to find an obstructed spaces. Our urban settings think they’re doing us a favor by creating parks with highly formed, pre-intend structures and activities and only in the last 10 years have they woken up to the fact that those wonderful nature areas within the parks provide relief and support for the human being. Even a small area of native species with trees and logs and big rocks can be so renewing and peaceful for even adult human beings and they are thrilling for children.
Our school remains dedicated to this and our program has grown to more than 40 students with six staff every Friday in our nature immersion program. We have found that overtime now about 16 years that nature margin is a wonderful part of the education of the child and will influence them deeply for the rest of their lives.