Member Spotlight

Elements Preschool was created to provide children living in the heart of NYC with daily access to nature and nature-based activities and education.

Eliza Minnucci founded a public school kindergarten Forest Day program and now team-teaches and leads professional development to help other teachers take their students outside.

Dublin, OH, is committed to providing the best quality of life and environment to its 40,000+ residents. We were intrigued to learn about the city's many nature-based programs for young children and asked Barbara Ray, Dublin's Nature Education Coordinator, to tell us more about them!

A popular early childhood program of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Campbell Creek Science Center in Anchorage, AK, was recently expanded with the help of a local preschool teacher.

The 40-acre Woodend Nature Sanctuary, just minutes from Washington, DC, is the headquarters of the Audubon Naturalist Society as well as the home of the Audubon Nature Preschool.

Nature Nuts runs a year-round Forest School for young children in Maple Valley, WA. The school has recently been accredited in the Cedarsong Way Teaching Methodology. We asked the school's Lead Instructor, Brenda Running, to tell us more about it.

Empowering people to respect, protect, and enjoy the natural world is central to the mission of the Aldo Leopold Nature Center and its programs in Monona, WI, including the Wonder Bugs Preschool Program.

Every year, the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science welcomes 100,000 visitors to its trails, exhibits, and collections. An increasing number of those visitors bring along young children to climb a tree in the Preschool Room, play with puppets, visit animal habitats, and listen to captivating stories under the guidance of preschool education staff. Find out how early childhood programs fit into the Museum's mission and what advice the Museum has for other natural science institutions that want to better serve young children and their caregivers.

The Center for Nature and Place-based Early Childhood Education is a teacher preparation and professional development initiative based at Prescott College in the central highlands of Arizona.

SHP Leading Design provides architectural design, planning, engineering, and other services to educational institutions and other clients. We asked Ed Melvin, Landscape Architect, and John Noble, Project Architect, to tell us about their approach to the design of spaces for learning in early childhood.

We asked Dr. Yashwant Bhagwanji, the Executive Editor of the International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education's, about the influences behind his work and some of his exciting plans for the future.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts uses nature to promote children's development and growth. We asked the museum's Early Childhood Education Programs Coordinator to tell us more about their approach and share some lessons learned with similar institutions interested in increasing their nature-based early learning offerings.