Resources
Forest Kindergartens: The Cedarsong Way
Erin K. Kenny has spent twenty years designing environmental education programs for children with the goal of creating positive connections to the natural world that lead to lifelong activism. In 2007, Erin established the nonprofit Cedarsong Nature School and developed the first U.S forest kindergarten based on the German waldkindergartens. With over a decade of experience running the Cedarsong program, Erin has become an internationally recognized expert in the forest kindergarten early childhood education model, which is distinguished by its commitment to 100% outdoor time, interest-led flow learning, emergent curriculum and inquiry-based teaching style. Erin’s heartfelt book is both profound and pragmatic. As she shares her own journey of learning about what it means to provide immersive preschool experience in an outdoor woodland habitat, Erin takes us deep into the rationale, philosophy, approach, and day-by-day management realities of being authentically in the outdoors. Cedarsong’s Forest Kindergarten is considered the gold standard for forest kindergartens in the U.S. and David Sobel, Senior Faculty in the Education Department at Antioch University and author of the seminal Place-Based Education, remarks on the back cover that he appreciates Erin’s “commitment to bringing the Forest Kindergarten spirit to North America.”