By Erin Acosta

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 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.

The first time my boss and I met, she told me that, “A large part of the job is raising future environmentalists.” We were walking through the garden where the outdoor preschool would commence in the fall. It was late August and the flower beds were in full bloom—packed tightly with swaths of zinnias and echinaceas. It was hard to imagine a more picturesque setting for an outdoor school. Every few feet my boss paused to point out a different species of interest. Later that day, as she led a tour for prospective parents, she pointed out those same plants and talked about the importance of building empathy for the natural world, the parents nodding along as she spoke. I did not fully grasp how strong the connection between environmentalism and outdoor preschools is until I began working at BOPN. Over the course of the year, I watched my students gain confidence in themselves and their environment. My students went from fearing the natural world around them, shying away from insects and bad weather, to dancing freely in rainstorms and flipping over logs to observe the writhing life below. I spoke with one of the founders of the school I worked for, Sara Murray, about the connection between environmentalism and outdoor preschools. In her response Murray paraphrased what Ken Finch, the founder and president of Green Hearts Institute for Nature in Childhood had said in his keynote speech at the Eastern Region Association of Forest and Nature Schools (ERAFANS) “Wonder Summit”: “ Early childhood educators want the very best thing for young children. Environmentalists want what’s best for the environment. Nature preschools offer the very best way for young children to spend their time (exploring, learning, and connecting with nature) while falling in love with the natural world they will be tasked with caring for as adults.”

The heart of all preschool learning, both nature based and traditional, is the development of social-emotional skills. Developing empathy and the ability to solve social disagreements makes up the bulk of preschool education. Traditional preschools have students develop these skills through interacting with their classmates and teachers. Outdoor preschools have the added dynamic of allowing for children to develop empathy through activities where they can interact with the natural world. My students learned to share and provide each other comfort while simultaneously learning to hold insects with gentle hands and leave flowers unpicked. The concept we operated under was that if we teach children to develop social-emotional skills for both humans and nature at once, there will no longer be a separation between empathizing for and loving friends and empathizing for and loving one’s environment.

Through continued immersion, nature preschools encourage children to care deeply about the natural world which helps to bridge the growing divide between children and nature. As Murray explained, “People protect what is important to them and what they care about. If you don’t have a connection to nature, you don’t necessarily care if it’s still there or not.”

Part of our disconnection with nature is due to a significant lack of access. A common misconception of today is that parents default to supplying children with tablets and internet resources out of convenience and a general devaluation of nature. In reality, many families are simply unable to fit time in nature into their lives. As Sara Murray explained, while discussing the current trend of raising preschool aged children online instead of outside, “a lot of that is practical. Not all families have a caregiver who is willing and able and available to go outside on a regular basis and not everyone has easy access to natural spaces on a regular basis. Many parents and people raising children need to work full time. Not all neighborhoods have natural elements. Not everyone has access to proper outerwear to be outside in the rain and cold weather. It’s easier to be inside and online and often more practical and possible for complicated modern living.”

There are definite barriers to being outdoors and to enrolling children in outdoor preschools. From a financial standpoint, outdoor preschools are simply impossible for many families to afford. Even when outdoor schools offer scholarships, they still require safe green spaces and are usually located in more affluent areas, leading to transportation barriers. Additionally, Murray mentioned that the appropriate gear is expensive and the school day schedules are sometimes impractical for families with parents who work full time. Luckily, there is a push within the outdoor

education community to create more accessible outdoor programs. For example, the Oregon Health & Wellness Initiative, a branch of the non-profit Willamette Partnership, has an online document titled “Outdoor Preschool Equity Toolkit” which they put together after conducting interviews with 15 outdoor preschools in 2019 and 2020. The toolkit covers solutions for creating financial, logistical, and cultural equity. BOPN is working on implementing many of the initiatives outlined in the toolbox such as offering scholarships, full day programs, and opening locations in areas where families have little access to outdoor spaces.

That said, there is still much work to be done when it comes to making early-childhood outdoor education accessible. Access to nature needs to become more of a priority in the environmental movement. During my time at BOPN I was able to observe how beneficial quality time spent in nature is for young children. My students worked on their gross motor skills and built self confidence by balancing on logs and climbing trees. As for social skills, they developed empathy by interacting with frogs and worms and each other. They learned about the seasons, not passively by looking at colorful paper handouts, but from observing the daily change in temperature, and the seasonal migrations of different animals. As teachers we never pretended that it was easy to be outside in all weather; instead we taught our students strategies like keeping their bodies moving to stay warm. Developing resiliency took time but by deep winter they were all doing jumping jacks in pairs and trios, snow falling on their knit caps, laughing despite their pink faces.

A week before school let out, my class came across a particularly brutal depiction of nature, their reaction to which served as lasting verification that they learned to appreciate nature for what it is—brutal and beautiful and worthy of our attention and protection.

We were at our favorite tree, an enormous American beech whose branching canopy spread out so magnificently that it was always our go to on hot days. For the past two weeks, we had been visiting a toad that lived in the beech tree’s exposed roots, and that day we expected to find it there again. When we arrived, however, we found our toad in the midst of being eaten by a garter snake. My co-teacher and I were initially unsure of how our students would respond to the bloody and conspicuous scene.

We roped off the area but allowed the children to observe from afar if they wanted to. Many children stayed to watch the toad be eaten. They asked questions like, “Is he okay?” and, “Can we feed it something else?” They were generally distraught that our toad was meeting such a sudden end, but more than anything they were intrigued and accepting. They understood that in nature, snakes eat toads sometimes. When the snake finished its meal, it slithered away through a fence and the children waved to it. We talked about how snakes do not have grocery stores like people do and that the snake was probably very happy to have a full belly even though it was very sad that we would not see our toad anymore. Sitting in a large circle on the ground, we all painted watercolor pictures for the toad and the snake. In that moment, I knew that all of my students had grown immeasurably in their understanding and love for the environment. To be able to watch something they named and bonded with be eaten, and still have love for the animal that ate, is a skill that few adults have. It is exactly this deep and persistent compassion for nature that demonstrates outdoor preschools are valuable contributors to the underpinnings of environmentalism. H

Art by Sadie Holmes