On a cool, wet October morning, a group of 15 Unity College students and two faculty members came to Juniper Hill School for Place-Based Education in Alna to see progressive principles of education in action as part of the school's new observation program. Supported by a grant through Antioch University New England (www.antiochne.edu), Juniper Hill School is hosting observation programming several times throughout the 2015-16 school year for teaching colleges, elementary teaching professionals, and community/health care organizations.

With Juniper Hill School Director Anne Stires as their guide, Unity students and faculty visited the Seeds/Nature prekindergarten class for the day and learned about the importance of teaching risk-taking in ways that fit the needs and skills of young children that enables them to build important motor skills and social-emotional competence. The 3- to 5-year-old children at Juniper Hill School, for example, are encouraged to climb trees, know how to correctly identify poison ivy, and to seek the permission of their teacher before eating any of nature’s wild edible treasures. The students are also taught how to treat one another with kindness and to resolve social difficulties in appropriate ways. There are intrinsic benefits of developmentally appropriate risk-taking and Juniper Hill School's philosophical dedication to teaching students how and why to be kind to one another. The focus on the happy and the healthy yields two classrooms of students deeply dedicated to their academic course of study as they grow.

School starts at 8:30 a.m., when the children – equipped with backpacks and dressed in rain gear, boots, and warm layers – arrive at the Welcome Woods on the upper campus. The students and teachers greet one another and share their gratitude for the beautiful rainy day (As the faculty members tell families at Juniper Hill School, “There is no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing.”). As they descend down the hill, they use Spanish words to describe the weather -- “mira la lluvia, hace frio,” sing songs, and notice nature as they transition from the woods to the Yurt classroom for packing up, then to the meadow and into the lower campus woods. The Salamander Woods outdoor classroom is the daily destination and activity hub for the preschoolers at Juniper Hill School. In this peaceful setting, the youngest children at the school make cakes in the mud kitchen, use a mortar and pestle to create pigments for tree painting with various sizes of brushes (for fine and gross motor practice), play family in the house of sticks and branches, climb fallen logs, and sing songs, repeat verse, and tell stories in the peace circle. There is little or no need for commercial playthings or typical indoor teaching materials. Sticks, stones, feathers, pine needles, acorns, leaves, and other natural treasures become props for dramatic play, tools for science experiments, and math manipulatives. Reading and writing happens in the screen house called the Toadstool Library.

The preschooler students practice their motor skills by climbing, digging, rolling, squatting, hiking and making tools, such as stone and stick hammers. The school operates on the premise: the more senses that are involved in a child's experience, the deeper the learning process. Students (at all the ages at the school) actively engage all their senses Juniper Hill woods. The prekindergarten day at Juniper Hill School takes place outdoors, every day of the week and every season of the year. Wet or dry, sunny or cloudy, cold or warm, the children learn through high quality nature-based teaching—planting gardens, creating nature journals, and investigation in the woods! They learn through adventure in this unconventional 40 acre classroom of woods, wetlands, and fields. This type of education is literally outside the box of the typical modern classroom and emphasizes direct experience, self-directed inquiry, teamwork, and self-reliance. It mirrors the academically rigorous, yet exploratory and nature-based, rural one-room classrooms of the early 20th century. It was a wonderful opportunity for Unity Education students to see awe-inspiring child-centered teaching in an outdoor context.

For more information about the school, please visit the website: www.juniperhillschool.org, contact: info@juniperhillschool.org, or (207) 586-5711.