Wild Childhood: What We Can Learn from European Forest Schools

In Germany and Scandinavia, outdoor education isn't a new idea. It's simply part of childhood.

Forest school can sound like a modern educational movement: take children outside, let them climb, build, explore, investigate nature, and spend less time sitting at desks. Add some excellent rain gear and suddenly you have a progressive new approach to education. Except Northern Europeans have been doing versions of this for generations.

Germany's Waldkindergärten—literally "forest kindergartens"—and the outdoor early childhood traditions of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland are part of a much broader cultural approach to childhood. The models differ from country to country, but they share an important idea: young children need significant amounts of time outdoors, and being outside is not separate from their education.

This is particularly interesting during the years between four and six. In the United States, we increasingly talk about these years in terms of preparation: kindergarten readiness, reading readiness, school readiness. European forest-school traditions offer another perspective. Children can be preparing for school while also having a childhood that is active, muddy, imaginative, and deeply connected to the world around them.

Germany: Where Kindergarten Began

The word kindergarten was created by German educator Friedrich Fröbel in the nineteenth century. His original vision looked considerably different from the highly academic kindergarten many American children experience today. Fröbel believed young children learned through play, movement, creativity, relationships, observation, and interaction with the natural world. The "garden" in kindergarten wasn't accidental.

Modern German Waldkindergärten take that relationship with nature even further. Children may spend most or virtually all of their school day outside, often with only a small shelter rather than a conventional classroom.

The forest becomes the classroom. Children walk, build, collect, investigate, tell stories, create games, observe seasonal changes, and work together. Teachers guide the learning, but the landscape supplies much of the material.

There is something powerful about an environment where almost nothing comes with instructions. A stick doesn't have one correct purpose. It can become a measuring tool, a fishing pole, a letter, a bridge, a flag, or part of an elaborate imaginary world.

Scandinavia: Outside Is Just Where You Go

Denmark played an important role in the development of modern forest kindergarten, while Sweden and Norway have their own strong traditions of outdoor early childhood education. These approaches sit within a broader Nordic relationship with outdoor life. In Sweden and Norway, the concept of friluftsliv—roughly translated as "open-air life"—captures some of this philosophy. Nature isn't necessarily somewhere you travel to for an adventure. Spending time outdoors is simply part of everyday life.

Sweden's I Ur och Skur ("Rain or Shine") preschools embody that beautifully. Children spend substantial portions of their days outdoors throughout the seasons. You don't wait for a beautiful day to go outside. You go outside because it is the day. For young children, that creates an understanding of the natural world that is difficult to reproduce indoors. They don't simply learn that seasons change. They notice the quality of the light, discover what happens to frozen ground when the sun reaches it, watch water collect after a storm, and recognize when birds disappear and return. This is science before anyone calls it science.

But What Are They Actually Learning?

When American parents first encounter forest kindergarten, there is often an understandable question beneath all the enthusiasm about mud and trees: But when do they learn? The answer depends partly on what we consider learning.

A group of five-year-olds constructing a shelter is working with spatial reasoning, engineering, communication, planning, and collaboration. Children sorting natural materials are exploring classification and quantity. A child examining an insect is practicing observation. Asking why it lives beneath a log begins scientific inquiry. Drawing it requires attention to detail. Describing it develops language. Finding its name in a field guide introduces print as a useful tool for answering a real question.

The academic concepts are there. They simply have context. This doesn't mean children should somehow discover reading or mathematics entirely on their own. Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland have different educational systems, and there is no single European forest-school curriculum. The more useful lesson is that four-, five-, and six-year-olds do not have to spend most of their day sitting at a table in order to be learning. Their bodies can be moving while their brains are working.

Play and Academics Don't Have to Compete

One of the things we find most compelling about Northern European early childhood education is its broader definition of what an educated young child should be able to do. Play, relationships, movement, independence, curiosity, and well-being remain important parts of early education. Academic development exists alongside them rather than automatically replacing them. The goal isn't simply to produce a five-year-old who can perform first-grade tasks earlier. We want children who are curious, socially capable, physically confident, increasingly independent, willing to persist, and genuinely interested in ideas.

Those qualities don't compete with academics. They make academics possible.

Our Forest School Just Happens to Have an Ocean

At Blue School, we are inspired by the forest-school traditions of Germany and Northern Europe, but we aren't trying to recreate a Danish kindergarten on the California coast.That would miss the point of place-based education. A school should belong to its place.

Our children don't live beside Scandinavian pine forests. They live beside the Pacific. Their landscape includes beaches, coastal sage scrub, tide pools, creeks, marine mammals, shorebirds, waves, fog, and the extraordinary intersection between land and sea that defines coastal California. So our version of forest school looks different. Our kids hike, build, climb, investigate, swim, surf, and learn how to read the ocean as well as the trail.

Alongside those experiences, we intentionally teach the academic foundations children need. We teach phonics and early literacy. We develop mathematical thinking. We investigate biology, ecology, physics, weather, and the natural systems children encounter around them.

Play begins the learning. It doesn't have to end it. European forest schools remind us that preparing children for the future doesn't require rushing them out of childhood. Four-, five-, and six-year-olds can learn to read and still spend their days outside. They can develop mathematical thinking while building something. They can investigate science by investigating the actual world.

Research & Further Reading

Fjørtoft, I. (2001). The Natural Environment as a Playground for Children: The Impact of Outdoor Play Activities in Pre-Primary School Children. Early Childhood Education Journal, 29, 111–117.

Johnstone, A., et al. (2022). Nature-Based Early Childhood Education and Children's Social, Emotional and Cognitive Development: A Mixed-Methods Systematic Review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(10), 5967.

OECD. Starting Strong research on early childhood education and care provides comparative context for Nordic early childhood systems and their emphasis on play, participation, well-being, and holistic development.