As the fog lifted over a hillside on a chilly Wednesday morning, a small group of children in the Raven’s Wood Outdoor School for Renegades in Thetford Center, a program that offers outdoor education to children from kindergarten through 8th grade, worked their way along a trail in the woods. They were led by Phil Dimond and Matt Aucoin, the school’s two main teachers.
Carrying backpacks and handmade maps, the children, ages 6 to 9, were searching for a surveyor’s iron pin marking the northeast corner of the property as part of a unit called Storytelling through Mapmaking.
On the way there, they had already clambered up and down hillsides, navigated a small ravine and tiptoed through a dried-up pool that one of the students, Alice Craft, an 8-year-old home-schooled student from Vershire, had earlier dubbed Giggle Swamp because Dimond had made her laugh when they were going through it on a previous expedition.
After a few unsuccessful attempts, the group finally spotted a surveyor’s iron pin, hammered into the ground, that looked as if it marked a corner.
“Guys, this is the northeast corner!” Dimond called out.
The children clustered around him and carefully penciled in the spot in on their maps. Within seconds they spotted the next marker at a right angle from the northeast corner; the goal then became to determine the distance between that marker and the northeast corner.
After counting off the feet, Dimond estimated that it was about 72 feet: another measurement to be marked on the maps.
“We do math with distance-measuring rather than just solving problems on paper,” Aucoin said.
The hike had turned up other avenues of inquiry to investigate later on. The children had spotted a bed of small brown mushrooms around a coniferous tree (species to be determined once they’d consulted an identification guide), and spider webs on the ground (why were they there, and what kind of spiders?).
Along the way they’d also negotiated downed tree limbs as if they were balance beams, spied birds flying through the tree canopy and examined birch bark.
Whether or not they were conscious of it, the young students were putting into practice Dimond’s earlier admonition, “Don’t forget to look up! Don’t forget to listen!”
Raven’s Wood, which opened in mid-September, was founded by Cindy Perry, a veteran teacher. The program is located on 49 acres that Perry owns with her husband Marc Chabot, a teacher at Thetford Academy.
Currently, the school offers a program on Mondays and Wednesdays, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., to 10 children, seven of whom are home-schooled; the other three attend area public schools. Each child attends one day a week.
The hope is that, as the program attracts more students, it will offer outdoor classes Monday through Friday, and to high school students. The program, which costs $1,950 per year, also offers financial aid.
Perry is not drawing a salary currently: this is a labor of love that she is currently financing through the school fees, her own money and a modest sum raised through Go Fund Me, the crowd-funding website.
Raven’s Wood status as a non-profit 501c3 is pending and once that comes through Perry will begin applying for grants. No public school funds go to Raven’s Wood.
There are a number of programs in the country that have begun to incorporate outdoor classrooms, or what’s called nature-based learning, into the curriculum for elementary school-age children, based on some European models for forest kindergartens.
In his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, author Richard Louv argued that the proliferation of technological devices are stripping away our children’s interest in being outside, which has profound implications for how we view and conserve nature as adults.
The Ottauquechee School in Quechee offers a Forest Kindergarten, and the Sustainability Academy at Lawrence Barnes School in Burlington, collaborates with Shelburne Farms’ Sustainable School Project, to incorporate environmental education practices into the Barnes School’s curriculum. Bethel Elementary School also offers a one-day-per-week outdoor classroom for its kindergarteners.
Crow’s Path in Burlington, an independent program, accepts children from area public schools in grades K-5 for their outdoor education classes.
Antioch University New England in Keene, N.H., now offers a Nature-Based Early Childhood Education Certificate through its Department of Education, which trains teachers, administrators and founders of nature preschools and forest kindergartens. (Both Dimond and Aucoin are taking a version of the course at the Ottauquechee School, Perry said.)
Raven’s Wood is not affiliated with any area public or independent school, but the curriculum is aligned with both the Common Core and the Next Generation Science Standards, Perry said.
Students begin the day with a morning meeting in Perry’s home and then move outside, up a trail into the woods to a base camp where there is a chalkboard, a common area and a cooking area.
The children choose places to sit and call their own. They listen to and talk about stories and storytelling. Although students bring their own lunches, they also learn to cook over an open fire, often using vegetables from Perry’s garden.
The staff prepares lesson plans in four-week segments. After mapmaking and storytelling, the next unit will look at Design and Function.
“They have those opportunities to learn outside by applying what they learn at school,” Perry said.
The Raven’s Wood calendar aligns with the public school calendar, but begins in mid-September and ends near the end of May so that children can participate in public school activities at the start and end of the school year.
Because the emphasis is on outdoor learning, the school will take a six-week hiatus from Dec. 19 through Jan. 27, both to accommodate the holidays and because it will be too cold to be outside for hours at a time.
Perry has been a teacher for 22 years and is certified as an elementary school teacher in Massachusetts and Vermont, she said. She also has a master’s degree in education.
She has taught at the independent Open Fields School in Thetford and at Thetford Academy, and worked as a both a site director and summer camp director in the One Planet After School program for K-6 students in both Sharon and Tunbridge.
(One Planet serves the eight schools in the White River Valley Supervisory Union. Dimond was both an on-site and summer camp director at Tunbridge Central School and Aucoin was a teacher in the Sharon One Planet program.)
Perry’s hope is that Raven’s Wood can become a model to other schools or programs that want to initiate outdoor learning.
“If you want to educate (children) you have to reach them. That’s really the crux of my drive here in providing this opportunity for kids. You’re growing a child. I’m passionate about this, and I really want to have some evidence that says you can do this, too,” she said.
The program encourages elementary school children to “make spaces outside and let them learn for themselves. … They’re learning without learning, and getting science lessons and getting to explore STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) ideas that are their own,” Perry added.
Perry decided to start Raven’s Wood, she said, because she had observed that students in elementary school seemed to be experiencing increased stress from the obligations of their school work and standardized testing at a younger age.
“They just wanted to run and get outside and stop having people telling them what to do. They loved these open-ended things they could go and explore without people’s expectations,” Perry said.
Sometimes children had behavioral issues that were not always helped by the structure of school, she said.
And the time for recess in some schools seemed to be shrinking, limiting kids’ outdoor time, and making some of them more restless, she said.
“By the time they got to me (at the after-school program) I wanted to nix the homework for the little kids; they need to be kids for some part of this day,” Perry said.
What she wants to do, she said, is help students to experience blocks of time when they are able to use what they’re learning in school by applying it to what they are observing in nature — and are not expected to sit at a desk. Being outside also helps children learn how to socialize and collaborate, Perry said.
Dimond echoed her sentiments. “The structure here is to help them discover. They don’t have to look to us for what to do, but they can come to us if they want to,” he said.
Laura Craft, of Vershire, signed up her daughter Alice because she “thought this was a great opportunity for her to be with other kids in an outdoor environment, problem solving with other kids and learning how to work with other kids. Plus the fact that it’s an outdoor school, I think that’s really important. We need to be outside and connected with nature and the planet we live on — and not plugged in,” Craft said.
“I appreciate that this program gets my kids outside for a significant period of time each week and allows them to see the seasons change with repeated exposure to the same piece of land,” wrote Sarah Spence in an email.
Spence, who learned about the program on Facebook, lives in St. Johnsbury with her husband and they send their two children Ethan, 10, and Julia, 8, to Raven’s Wood.
Both children, Spence wrote, are interested “in knowing how to find their way around in the woods. … I think it is important that kids learn how to take care of themselves in the real world, not just in a sanitized situation where all the variables are controlled.”
For more information about Raven’s Wood School, go to www.ravenswoodschoolvt.com.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.