A Forest Days Handbook: Program Design for School Days Outside

Written by Eliza Minnucci with Meghan Teachout The Forest Days Handbook answers the frequently asked questions about choosing an outdoor classroom space, developing routines, building light infrastructure, and offers narrative examples of what a kindergarten Forest Day might look like. Accompanied by photos of students on their Forest Day, and with a foreword by David Sobel, this book gives a passionate teacher the con?dence to step beyond the schoolyard.

Included as an appendix is also a collection of case studies commissioned by AUNE describing three public kindergarten Forest Day programs. Students, teachers, parents and administrators weigh in with their perspectives on the Forest Day movement.

Eliza Minnucci was raised in Deerfield, New Hampshire. She now makes her home in Tunbridge, Vermont with her husband, Keith and sons, Finn and Auden. Before teaching Kindergarten in Quechee, Vermont, she taught young children in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, Chicago, Seattle, and Fort Yukon, Alaska. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago, teacher certification from the Upper Valley Educators Institute and a master’s degree in education from New England College. On hiatus from the classroom, she supports teachers in cultivating nature-based play and learning for their students through consultation and teaching the Nature-based Early Childhood Curriculum course at Antioch University New England. She is a frequent presenter at In Bloom conferences throughout New England. She loves snow-rollers, jack-in-the-pulpits and indigo buntings.

Meghan Teachout was raised in the suburbs of New York City. She has settled in Strafford, Vermont with her husband, Cabot, and their three children, Elva, Otto and Ulysses. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Vermont and completed teacher training at the Upper Valley Educators Institute. With Eliza, she co-founded the Forest Day program at the Ottauquechee School in 2013. She now supports teachers in cultivating nature-based routines by team-teaching, and leading professional learning communities. She loves spring ephemerals, cloud-watching, and snowflake shapes.

David T. Sobel, M. Ed., author of Wild Play: Parenting Adventures in the Great Outdoors (Green Writers Press, 2018), is senior faculty in the Education Department of Antioch New England University in Keene, New Hampshire. He consults and speaks widely on environmental education and child development and is the author of seven other books, including Nature Preschools and Forest Kindergartens: The Handbook for Outdoor Learning, Childhood and Nature: Design Principles for Educators, Place-based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities, and Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education. He has also written many articles about children and nature that have appeared in Orion, Encounter, Sierra, Sanctuary, Wondertime, Green Teacher, and other publications. He has served on the editorial boards of Encounter, Orion, and Community Works Journal, for which he writes a regular column. Sobel was identified as one of the “gurus and rock stars of environmental education” in a feature article in Teacher magazine and as one of the 2007 Daring Dozen educational leaders by Edutopia magazine. He lives in Harrisville, New Hampshire, and has two grown children.

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