There's a 3 year old boy named Evan. Like any 3 year old, he loves exploring and finding out about the world around him through play. But Evan doesn't attend a Forest School. I met Evan at an after school club where he spends most of his time indoors.
Here's a few things I noticed about the ways Evan likes to play:
Oh, it's also worth mentioning that Evan doesn't respond when you ask him to stop and even if you speak to him about his behaviour, he just does it again. When he's got his mind set on doing something... he's doing it. There's no stopping him (except for the locking the door example... so far). So Evan is viewed as a handful. There have been discussions on what to do about him since staff are concerned that he will harm himself or the other children. They ask, “What do you do with a child like this?”
So I thought about that question and decided to respond with another question: “But what if he did it at Forest School?” To answer this, let's use the list of Evan's behaviours above and simplify them into categories to describe the ways Evan likes to play. Then let's think about if he did it at Forest School:
So do Evan's behaviours of bashing, throwing, jumping, climbing, and running make him a handful? When you put it in the context of Forest School, he sounds just like a normal kid to me! So instead of asking the question, “How do we change the child to fit the environment?” maybe what we should really be asking is, “How do we change the environment to fit the child?”