Lifestyle
Children are stuck inside, glued to screens. Are 'forest schools' the antidote?
On a glorious summer day, a preschooler named Roger teetered on rocks dotting a creek in eastern Orange County, unsure if he could make it back to where his classmates and caregivers were waiting.
A volunteer youth mentor with Earthroots Field School stuck out her hand, reassuring the 3-year-old, who grasped it and took one confident step toward her. Then another. “There we go!” someone called out as he cleared the burbling waterway.
Pushing edges — like learning to balance on rocks without a parent swooping in — is a central tenet of nature-based education, according to Angela Capps, a teacher at the school, one of a rapidly growing number of early education providers that are centered around the natural world.
Youngsters use artificial eggs and natural materials to create nests during forest kindergarten summer camp at Earthroots Field School in Silverado Canyon.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Nature-based education — sometimes called forest schools, nature preschools or outdoor kindergartens — is based on a straightforward premise: “that it’s really good to have kids outdoors a goodly chunk of their day,” said David Sobel, professor emeritus at Antioch University New England and author of “Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education.”
Indeed, researchers have found nature-based learning supports creativity, resiliency, executive function, school readiness and a host of other benefits for the body and mind.
Scandinavia-originated forest schools arrived in the U.S. in the 1960s and are part of the broader nature-based education movement. In recent years, the concept has exploded amid worries about children getting lost in the virtual world and the country’s youth mental health crisis. The pandemic turbocharged the trend, as schools closed and parents sought safe learning environments for their preschoolers.
As of the last school year, there were about 800 nature preschools in the U.S., a 200% increase since 2017, according to a survey by the nonprofit Natural Start Alliance, which supports access to nature-based early childhood education. California is among the top three states with the highest number of schools, which primarily serve children ages 3 to 5.
Children and parents explore a creek on a temperate summer day during forest kindergarten camp at Big Oak Canyon, a 39-acre property that serves as home base for Earthroots Field School.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Proponents say children immersed in nature are happier and healthier — and may be poised to become the next generation of climate warriors. An early connection to nature can plant the seeds for its stewardship.
“We only protect that which we love,” said Lia Grippo, president of the California Assn. of Forest Schools. “If we want children to grow into adults who can carry the burdens, honestly, we and previous generations have created for them, then they have to be in love with the land they live on.”
While the movement is suffused with optimism — as growth shows no sign of slowing down — there are challenges.
A large number of programs are unlicensed and therefore unable to tap public funding, prompting criticism that they’re only accessible to wealthy families who can pay tuition, and the movement is contending with a stark lack of diversity that hasn’t meaningfully improved even as programs multiplied.
According to Alliance’s recent survey, white children made up 78% of the student bodies of nature preschools, compared with roughly 47% of the U.S population. Latino and Black children are underrepresented relative to the broader population. (Addressing racial disparities is top of mind for many nature educators, and this past year saw the creation of the Black Educator Network, an Alliance-affiliated professional community for Black educators in nature-based early education.)
Many of the programs are geared toward preschoolers, in part because of a desire to front-load a child’s life with meaningful experiences in nature. Another reason is early education tends to be more flexible than grade school in terms of structure and regulation, or as Sobel puts it: It’s “less riddled with academic expectations so it’s a place where the innovation could happen easier.”
Many programs strive to develop environmental literacy, which can broadly be defined as understanding and caring about environmental issues and having the skills needed to work toward solving them. But how do teachers start molding preschoolers into model environmental citizens?
Jodi Levine, executive director of Earthroots Field School, helps a summer camp attendee make a nest.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Jodi Levine, executive director of Earthroots, said the teachers don’t directly discuss climate change with their very young learners. Creating lessons that help kids “fall in love with nature” is “all that they need to understand the beauty of it and the value so that it’s not destroyed,” she said.
Becca Hackett-Levy, founder and director of Northeast L.A. Forest School, said learning about climate change “can start the day they come out of the womb.” It’s not about discussing the science or overarching concepts, but “about being present in nature and seeing what we as humans are doing.”
Children also experience it firsthand. Last year, a brush fire forced a group to evacuate from Elysian Park. Ash rained down as the children were asked to share what they felt, saw, heard, tasted and smelled. Hackett-Levy said it was a concrete lesson about a warming climate colliding with dry invasive grasses.
Fabienne Hadorn, co-founder of the Arroyo Nature School, which operates outdoors in a public park in Pasadena, said the topic sometimes comes up as children ask questions and make observations. The discussions don’t involve the term “climate change,” but center on the impacts — such as cars causing damage to the air. The emphasis is often on the need to take care of the planet.
Scout, 2, plays in the mud kitchen at Arroyo Nature School. She made several delicious “cakes.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Talking about climate change can be stressful, but not all stress is equal, according to Rahil Briggs, national director of Zero to Three’s HealthySteps, a pediatric primary care program. If a child is in a stable, safe and nurturing environment, they can experience “positive stress.” A small amount of motivating anxiety, she said, is helpful for learning new skills. It can be felt while learning to cross a stream or discussing the environment in a developmentally appropriate way.
While California education officials have championed environmental literacy for students, foundational elements of nature school can put it at odds with public education and regulatory norms.
Nature schools, for example, typically embrace managed risk. Many in the movement see exposing kids to experiences such as climbing a tree as key to developing the resiliency needed to withstand future stressors.
Hadorn said her staff may offer guidance as the children climb trees, advising where to put their foot, or catch them if they falter, but the youngsters lead the charge. “We make sure a teacher at every moment is there if they want to climb,” she added.
Children play beneath the trees on a warm summer day at Arroyo Nature School.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Operating outside can also create tension with public land managers. Levine said she was kicked out of two parks as she learned to navigate the rules — including the requirement that visitors stay on paths. “We know better now,” she said, and students are taught to respect the rules of places they go. (Eventually the school acquired a property in Silverado Canyon.)
Hadorn said she moved locations in Lower Arroyo Park after officials tried to charge her a fee associated with renting out a specific area of the park — a category she doesn’t think applies to her roving band of children. She said she has a good relationship with the rangers and always makes sure the area is left in pristine condition.
Hackett-Levy approached L.A. city park officials and worked out an agreement to hold classes in Elysian and Griffith parks. Previously, she’d sometimes try to nab a first-come, first-served area, but would find herself scrambling if someone else had gotten there first.
According to the survey by Natural Start Alliance, 42% of nature schools are not licensed. The percentage is much smaller for programs that are based entirely outdoors, and, according to state regulators, there are none in California.
Kit Harrington, Alliance’s senior policy advisor, said these schools often operate for fewer hours or with fewer children than required for licensing, or are otherwise exempt. Being unlicensed “could imply that something should be licensed but isn’t (as in an unlicensed doctor, for example),” she said in an email. “In the case of these programs, they are primarily operating in ways that don’t require them to be licensed.”
In many states, fully outdoor schools aren’t eligible for licensing. California regulators indicated it’s a gray area and there does not appear to be an effort to clarify the rules or develop new ones.
Earthroots Field School’s Jodi Levine helps children up a bank after checking out a creek.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Some nature educators want a path to licensing, but others fear regulations will undercut the spirit of the programs.
Hadorn wonders what might become of tree climbing. Would they set a height limit? She acknowledges that there are upsides, however, such as providing security for parents.
Zoli, 4, plays with yarn and sticks at Arroyo Nature School.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
There’s also concern that the landscape — the primary classroom for nature schools — is becoming less safe for youngsters. Extreme phenomena are challenging nature schools’ emphasis on withstanding the elements by simply wearing the right gear. California — touted as a great backdrop for outdoor education because of its frequent bluebird days — is experiencing increasingly fierce wildfires and punishing heat.
The elements disproportionately affect young children, whose smaller bodies absorb “more of the bad stuff,” said Briggs, who is also a clinical professor of pediatrics, psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
As the climate and regulatory landscape evolves, nature continues to teach.
On a recent scorching day, the cascading branches of a California peppertree enveloped a dozen children attending Arroyo Nature School. Hours passed without a phone in sight. Leo, Zoli and Francis wrapped yarn around sticks to create a makeshift jail. Desmond worked water into clay. Asa and Mylo read books about bugs and cars.
Scout brought over a fresh-baked cake to sample. The secret ingredient? Mud.
The gloopy stuff clung to the 2-year-old’s arms like organic opera gloves. It threatened to sully her white dress flecked with rainbows.
She didn’t mind.
On-air challenge
Today I’ve brought a game of ‘Categories’ based on the word “party.” For each category I give, you tell me something in it starting with each of the letters, P-A-R-T-Y. For example, if the category were “Four-Letter Boys’ Names” you might say Paul, Adam, Ross, Tony, and Yuri. Any answer that works is OK, and you can give answers in any order.
1. Colors
2. Major League Baseball Teams
3. Foreign Rivers
4. Foods for a Thanksgiving Meal
Last week’s challenge
I was at a library. On the shelf was a volume whose spine said “OUT TO SEA.” When I opened the volume, I found the contents has nothing to do with sailing or the sea in any sense. It wasn’t a book of fiction either. What was in the volume?
Challenge answer
It was a volume of an encyclopedia with entries from OUT- to SEA-.
Winner
Mark Karp of Marlboro Township, N.J.
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Joseph Young, of St. Cloud, Minn. Think of a two-syllable word in four letters. Add two letters in front and one letter behind to make a one-syllable word in seven letters. What words are these?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Wednesday, December 31 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.
“I’m his wife,” I said to the on-call doctor, asserting my place in the cramped exam room. It was a label I’d only recently acquired. A year ago, it had seemed silly to obtain government proof of what we’d known to be true for six years: We were life partners. Now I was so grateful we signed that piece of paper.
Earlier that morning, I’d driven my husband to an ER in Torrance for what we’d assumed was a nasty flu or its annoying bacterial equivalent. We’d imagined a round of industrial-grade antibiotics, and then heading home in time for our 3-year-old’s usual bath-time routine.
But the doctor’s face was serious. Machines beeped and whirred as my husband laid on the hospital bed. Whatever supernatural power colloquially known as a “gut feeling” flat-lined in my stomach.
“It’s leukemia,” she said, putting a clinical end to what had been our honeymoon period.
Only six months earlier, a female Elvis impersonator had declared us husband and wife. A burlesque dancer pressed her cleavage into both of our faces as our friends cheered and threw dollar bills. A wedding in Vegas was my idea.
After two years of dating Marty, a cute roller hockey player with an unwavering moral compass, I knew I wanted to have a child with him. It was marriage, not commitment, that unnerved me. I wanted romance, freedom and to do things my way. The word “wife” induced an allergic reaction.
As Marty and I became parents and navigated adulthood together, my resistance to matrimony started to feel like an outdated quirk. The emotional equivalent of a person still rocking a septum piercing long after they stopped listening to punk music.
Marty had shown me, over and over, what it was to be a teammate. He’d rubbed my back through hours of labor, made late-night runs for infant Tylenol and was never afraid to cry at the sad parts of movies or take the occasional harsh piece of feedback about his communication style. And like all good teams, we kicked ass together. So why was I still resisting something that meant so much to him? To our family?
One random Saturday, at the Hawthorne In-N-Out Burger, after Marty ordered fries as a treat for our son, I finally said, “Screw it. Let’s get married.”
The wedding day was raucous and covered in glitter. We both wore white. Our son’s jacket had a roaring tiger stitched onto the back and was layered over his toddler-size tuxedo T-shirt. Loved ones from all over the country flew to meet us in a tiny pink chapel. A neon heart buzzed over our heads as we vowed to “love each other in sickness and in health, till death do us part.”
I couldn’t have imagined then that the next chapel I’d be in would be the hospital prayer room. Or that I would have begged a God I struggle to believe in to please spare Marty’s life.
Unlike our decision to marry, acute leukemia came on suddenly. Over the course of a few weeks, Marty’s bone marrow had flooded his blood with malignant cells. Treatment was urgent. He was taken by ambulance from the ER to the City of Hope hospital in Duarte, a part of Los Angeles County we’d never had a reason to visit before.
Traditionally the 50th wedding anniversary is celebrated with gold, the 25th with silver and the first with paper. But we couldn’t even afford to look paper-far-ahead anymore. Instead, we celebrated that the specific genetic modifiers of Marty’s cancer were treatable, the good chemo days and his being able to walk to the hospital lobby to see our son for the first time in weeks.
Leukemia has taught me things such as: how to inject antifungal medication into the open PICC (peripherally inserted central catheter) line in Marty’s veins, how to explain to our son that “Papa will be sleeping with the doctors for a long while so they can help him feel better” and that to do the hibbity-dibbity with a person going through chemo, you must wear a condom. But mostly my husband’s sickness has taught me about healthy love.
When we had a child together, we’d committed to being in each other’s lives forever. But marriage was different. We’d already made a promise to our son, but when we got married, we made one to each other and ourselves. We had gone all in.
Since his diagnosis two months ago, there have been so many ways we’ve shown love for each other. People assume that I would do all the caregiving, but it’s more than that. Yes, I’ve washed my husband’s feet when he couldn’t bend down, been the only parent at preschool dropoff and pickup, and advocated on Marty’s behalf to his health insurance with only a few choice expletives.
But my husband has also taken care of me. Even when he was nauseous, sweating and fatigued, Marty showed up. He made me laugh with macabre jokes about how the only way for us to watch anything other than “PAW Patrol” on TV together was for him to get hospitalized. He insisted that I make time to rest and bring him the car owner’s manual, so he could figure out why the check engine light had come on.
We’d promised in front of our closest friends and Elvis herself to love each other “for better or worse.” And when the worst arrived sooner than expected, we did more than love. We truly cared for each other as husband and wife.
The author is a writer whose short stories have been nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and Best of the Net. She is working on a novel and lives in Redondo Beach with her husband and son. She’s on Instagram: @RachelReallyChapman.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
The missing 1916 painting Music, by Gabriele Münter. Its whereabouts have been unknown to the public since 1977. Oil on canvas. (Private collection. © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)
The Guggenheim, New York
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The Guggenheim, New York
This is a story about a missing painting, from an artist you may never have heard of. Though she helped shape European modern art, German artist Gabriele Münter’s work was quickly overshadowed in the public’s mind by her 12-year relationship with noted abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky.
She met Kandinsky in Munich in 1902, and with his tutoring, she “mastered color as well as the line,” she told a German public broadcaster in 1957. Together with other artists, they founded an avant-garde arts collective called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1911.
Wassily Kandinsky’s Painting With White Border (Bild mit weißem Rand), 1913. Oil on canvas, Guggenheim Museum, New York City.
Allison Chipak/The Guggenheim, New York
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Allison Chipak/The Guggenheim, New York
At the time, most modern artists, like Kandinsky, were moving toward more and more abstract work. Not Münter. In her paintings, people look like people and flowers look like flowers. But her dazzling colors, simplified forms and dramatic scenes are startlingly fresh; her domestic scenes are so immediate that they feel like you’ve interrupted a crucial, private moment.
“Gabriele Münter was so pioneering, so adventurous in her adherence to life,” said Megan Fontanella, curator of modern art and provenance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. “She is revitalizing the still life, the landscape, the portrait genres, and presenting them in these really fresh and dynamic ways.”
Yet, perhaps due to her relationship with Kandinsky, her work was rarely collected by important museums after her death in 1962 (she herself said she was seen as “an unnecessary side dish” to him), and so her paintings largely disappeared from the public eye.
Now Münter is having a moment, with exhibitions this year in Madrid and Paris, as well as one currently at the Guggenheim in New York. The New York show is an expansive one and includes American street photography in the late 1890s, alongside over 50 paintings, from her dazzlingly colored European landscapes to portraits capturing the expressive faces of people she knew.
Gabriele Münter’s Self-Portrait in Front of an Easel (Selbstbildnis vor der Staffelei), circa 1908-1909. Oil on canvas. (© 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)
Bruce M. White/Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, N.Y.
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Bruce M. White/Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, N.Y.
Yet, when Fontanella was putting “Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World” together, there was one painting she couldn’t find: Music, from 1916.
In it, a violinist is playing in the center of a yellow room, with two people quietly listening. It’s set in a living room — but because it uses her wild colors and flattened figures, it feels vibrant and dramatic, not cozy or saccharine.
Fontanella said this painting is important because it provides a window into Münter’s life after she separated from Kandinsky, who had gone on to marry someone else. She was struggling financially, and she was no longer the promising young person she once was. But Fontanella said the painting shows she had found a new creative circle.
“There’s something really uplifting about that. You know, it speaks to her resilience, her sense of adaptation,” Fontanella said. Instead of showing those years as dark and challenging, it is serene and warm, joyful. “I think that’s really important because especially with a woman artist, it’s so easy to get tripped up in her biography and really see it colored by her romantic relationships when, in fact, the paintings tell a different story.”
Fontanella said she used every tool available to her to find Music. She worked with Münter’s foundation and contacted owners of collections in Europe and the United States, from institutions to private collectors. She read correspondence and catalogs from past exhibitions.
Gabriele Münter’s From the Griesbräu Window (Vom Griesbräu Fenster), 1908. Painting on board. (© 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, on permanent loan from the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich
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Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, on permanent loan from the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich
It’s not unusual for art to vanish from public view if it’s not held at an institution. Private collectors often want to keep their holdings quiet. If they don’t sell a particular work at an auction or lend it to a museum, only a very small number of people might know that it still exists and where it is.
Fontanella was able to trace Music to its last known owner — a German collector named Eugen Eisenmann, who had the painting in 1977.
“There was a moment where the collection was starting to be broken apart and dispersed and no longer being held by subsequent relatives or family members,” she said.
Then the trail ended.
Not the end of the story
But just because the painting hasn’t surfaced yet doesn’t mean it never will. Take the story of a piece called There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to. —Washington, 26 December 1786, depicting Shays’ Rebellion, one of 30 works in the Struggle series by artist Jacob Lawrence. A 2020 traveling exhibition organized by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., had brought the works together for the first time in 60 years.
Five of the paintings couldn’t be located, and the curators put placeholders where those paintings should have been: black-and-white photographs of the canvases if they existed, blank spaces if they didn’t.
“We didn’t have any image of it. There really was no trace,” said Sylvia Yount, the curator in charge of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She co-curated the Met’s presentation of the exhibition with curator Randall Griffey. “We had decided to leave the missing panels as kind of an absence, to really underline the absence. There was a blank on the wall.”
And, then, the miracle.
A visitor to the exhibition went home, contacted a friend “and said, ‘I think you might have one of these missing panels,’” Yount explained.
The friend did. When Yount, Griffey and art conservator Isabelle Duvernois went to see the painting — which was just across Central Park from the Met in an apartment on the Upper West Side — “we walked in and immediately knew it was right,” Yount said.
Within about two weeks, it was hanging in the exhibition. Incredibly, not long later, a second panel was found. Because that one needed some conservation work and a new frame, it didn’t join the series at the Met, but it did become part of the show later as it traveled across the United States.
That kind of thing “doesn’t happen every day,” Yount said, laughing.
Could it happen again?
But Fontanella hopes that it could happen for Münter’s painting. She included a photograph of it in the catalog so that people would know what to look for.
“What I always hope with stories like this is that the painting will resurface in its own time, you know, when it wants to be discovered,” Fontanella said. “But there’s been so much genuine interest in Gabriele Münter as an artist, as a person, that I feel it’s only just on the horizon that this painting will come to light.”
“Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World” is on view at the Guggenheim in New York through April 2026.
Ciera Crawford edited this story for broadcast and digital. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.
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