Making Mud Soup: Lessons from an Outdoor Preschool By Erin Acosta Seated on a fallen tree in the woods, the little boy and I hold a mushroom guidebook between us. It is mid-morning in early April and the sun is casting shadows across our class’s ‘adventure spot.’ The shadows stretch out long over fallen branches, across the stumps and rotting logs where, when they are very lucky, my students find salamanders sleeping just beneath the bark. Most of the other preschoolers are busy building a fort, balancing branches against each other as my co-teacher watches. The student next to me is captivated by something else entirely. Dragging his finger across the brightly colored graphics, I listen as he categorizes the fungi by size, naming each one after a member of his family. “This is Papa,” he says pointing to the largest mushroom on the page, then to the next, “this is Mama.” When he gets to the smallest mushroom, he calls it his own name. Pulling the book into his lap, he tells a story about the mama, papa, and baby mushrooms all playing together. Though a traditional preschool might highlight this moment of storytelling as a demonstration of the boy’s cognitive ability, I am amazed by an entirely different skill. Within the past seven months of school, my student has internalized the most valuable understanding my co-teacher and I could ever hope to impart—that nature, like family, is something that can be loved and protected. He has learned to feel kinship with and empathy for the natural world. We spend the rest of the day looking for mushrooms, and many of his classmates join the hunt. As we walk through the woods they remind each other not to touch or uproot anything, telling their peers that, “What is attached stays attached.” Eventually, a child spots a cluster of turkey tail mushrooms on a branch, which leads us to
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gather around and greet the wrinkled fungi. After each of the children have gotten a chance to observe them closely, we leave the mushrooms exactly how we found them. I never planned on being an outdoor preschool teacher immediately after graduating high school. Yet, like many students in the class of 2020, I decided to take a gap year and look for work. I secured a job at Boston Outdoor Preschool Network (BOPN) as a preschool teacher, which coincidentally turned out to be an experience I valued deeply. Located at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society gardens and its surrounding woods, my co-teacher and I would take our class to a different ‘adventure spot’ each day. The children would spend time exploring the chosen locations and create their own games with minimal outside supplies. As a play-based and child-led school, BOPN emphasizes the importance of letting children experience nature through unstructured play. Typical activities included making mud soup, looking for animals, and engaging in imaginative games, all of which strengthened their relationships to their natural surroundings. As a play-based and child-led program we did not have a set curriculum but instead covered topics as they arose through our students’ interactions with the natural world. If, for example, our students discovered a frog, my co-teacher and I would bring in books about frogs the next day and plan mini-lessons and activities related to frogs for that week. Over the course of the school year we covered many of the same themes as traditional indoor programs but all of our lessons were molded to support the knowledge our students were already gaining from being immersed in nature.
