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Elementary Forest School Program

Heartseed is a forest school for kindergarten through fifth grade, held outdoors through the whole turning of the year. We serve full-time students and homeschooling families across Boulder County.

Children learn in small mixed-age groups, five children to each teacher, on one stretch of ground they come to know through every season. Reading, writing, and math run through all of it, guided toward Colorado’s academic standards, along with a great deal of time in the creek. We are paying attention to what a child knows, how she moves through a group, what she can do with her hands, and who she is becoming.

We are outside in every kind of Colorado weather, and we have a heated bus that comes to us on the coldest and wettest days, so a hard rain changes the shape of a day rather than canceling it.

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The Basics

• August through May, Monday through Thursday 

• Kindergarten through fifth grade (kindergarteners must be 5 by October 1)

• Five children to one teacher

• Daily Seesaw updates and one conference each semester

• We follow the BVSD schedule for weather closures

Where we meet

Our Louisville group gathers along Coal Creek. Our Boulder group meets at Chautauqua. Each group stays on its own ground all year, because something in a child changes from being in the same place long enough. A creek runs high in May and is nearly gone by August. A cottonwood comes down in a windstorm and stays down, and the children climb on it for the next three years. They stop being visitors, and it becomes a place they belong to.

Some of these children have been together for five years. That does something a single year cannot. They know each other’s moods, who is fast and who is careful, who to sit next to when the day is hard. When the group settles into circle it has the feel of old friends, because that is what they are. A child who joins gets brought into that, and a few months in it is hard to tell who has been here since kindergarten.

The teachers stay too. A child who arrives in kindergarten is known by the same adults through fifth grade, which changes what teaching can be. We are not starting over each September, guessing at who someone is. We have watched a child through six winters, we know what she was afraid of two years ago and what she can do now, and we can hold the long view of who she is becoming rather than only what she needs this month.

A day at Heartseed

Morning work. We start with something focused while everyone is fresh, usually math.

Gathering. A short circle, announcements, and what the day holds.

The walk to the creek. Fifteen or twenty minutes, longer if something interesting turns up. The children talk the whole way, and we look at what has changed since yesterday. What is blooming, what is frozen, who is calling. Walk the same route for a year and the place gets familiar.

Creek circle and snack. We settle in and eat together and check in. Some days this is where we work on feelings, putting words to what is going on inside, listening to someone else, learning what to do with a hard moment.

Long open play. Two hours or so, uninterrupted. This is where the social skills actually get tested, and where a kid builds the kind of focus that comes from being deep in something of his own choosing.

Academic time. Reading and writing in small groups. The older children work on their field studies.

Lunch. We eat together, and usually there is a story, or everyone talking at once about whatever the morning turned up.

Packing up and walking back.

Closing circle. Gratitudes, a story, goodbyes.

Focused work sits between long stretches of open play and walking. That is the shape of the day, and it is deliberate.

What we teach

Reading and writing. Phonics and early literacy in small groups, reading at each child’s level, journaling and writing woven through the year’s projects

Math. Measurement, fractions, and number work that comes out of real tasks, taught directly in small groups

Naturalist studies. Bird language, tracking and sign reading, seasonal phenology, plant identification and foraging, sit spot practice

Wilderness skills. Fire, shelter building, cordage, knife work, water skills, and craft with natural materials

Social and emotional learning. Morning and closing circles, direct lessons in naming feelings, listening, and working through conflict, stories that carry those lessons, and older children learning to look after younger ones

Story, art, and season. Original stories written for this place, songs, art and craft, and traditions that mark the turning of the year

A child who feels known can risk more. He will say the thing he is not sure about, try the harder version, be wrong out loud in front of everyone. So a good deal of our attention goes into seeing each child accurately and saying it out loud when we do, because children become what the adults around them notice. That includes noticing what he can already do when things get hard. And when a feeling gets bigger than he can hold alone, we come alongside and hold it with him.

Academics

Reading, writing, and math are guided toward the Colorado Academic Standards for each child’s grade level, taught in small groups at whatever pace is theirs. Out here they tend to arrive attached to something. A child works at her handwriting because she is keeping a record of what she has seen. She learns fractions because a recipe has to be halved for the group, or because the cordage needs to be a specific length. None of that replaces direct teaching, and when a child needs to be taught something outright, we teach it outright, sitting down, one small group at a time.

Grade level and age do not always match, and they do not have to. Because the groups are small, the work can be shaped to the child rather than to the grade. We meet each one exactly where she is, and where she is is honored.

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Visit

Most families decide after they have stood on the land and watched a morning happen. If Heartseed sounds like something your child would love, write to us and come see it.

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