As the last leaves of autumn sway on the trees surrounding Fairywood Forest School, the air is filled with squeaks of children playing and screeches of chickens squawking.

One girl chases a cream-colored chicken — “come here, Dumbledore!” — while another boy cradles a red hen in his arms. 

“Rock a bye baby, on the tree top,” the boy sings, small body swaying back and forth with the chicken. “When the wind blows, the cradle will rock…”

These children aren’t at a petting zoo — they’re at school. And their school is 100% outside. 

Fairywood Forest School is an outdoor school 20 miles east of Bloomington in Brown County. Local children ages three to eight gather each morning for school on the five acres of forested land that is Fairywood. 

There’s no such thing as an ordinary day at Fairywood. The school has no set curriculum, no set classroom, and no set schedule. It’s up to the kids and the elements to decide what they do each day. 

On this fall morning, students decide to hold class in the chicken coop so they can hold the newborn chicks. The small herd of children eventually loses interest and meanders out to play in the forest. Some roll around in piles of leaves while others work in the “kitchen” to make mud cakes. Another child dangles upside down from a tree branch.

Amid all the chaos of barefeet and giggling toddlers, two adults roam around Fairywood. A man in a wool wizard’s hat comforts a child who got pushed while playing, while a woman in a tie-dye shirt reads a book about a rainbow-feathered crow. 

Chris Barth and Sam Sondgerath are Fairywood’s co-founders and teachers. After years of experience working at local schools, they pair had a dream to combine their love for the outdoors and early childhood education. Thus, a forest school was born. 

The Indiana University alum bought a couple acres of land, moved into the forest and started a forest school. They founded Fairywood in 2017 as a space for play-based, hands-on learning in the outdoors.

Sondgerath said play is central to a child’s education at Fairywood. 

“When kids are inside all day, it can be really hard for them to move around,” she said. “So being outside allows for so much more freedom. We found nature to be really inspiring to their play.”

Kids are the curriculum at forest school, Sondgerath explained. Rather than a formal curriculum, kids go on adventures and explore things they’re most interested in. Fairywood teachers will add in content here and there. If kids want to learn ecology, teachers will take them to play with crayfish in the creek. Stacking blocks and watching them fall down is physics. Counting during hide-and-seek is math. 

Sondgerath said this style of learning isn’t just fun — it’s effective.

“If you look at any study through brain science, it shows that humans are meant to learn through playing, especially when you’re a kid. That’s how you learn how the world works.”

Fairywood Forest School is part of the recent “forest school” movement. Fairywood was inspired by the first forest school kindergarten in the United States, Cedarsong Nature School founded in 2007. Since Fairywood started in 2017, the number of forest schools in the United States more than doubled over the next three years according to the Natural Start Alliance’s 2020 report.

Although the formal movement of “forest schools” in the United States is relatively recent, Fairywood teacher Chris Barth said learning in nature is nothing new. It’s been happening for centuries.

“If you go way way back to hunter gatherer societies, this is how education was done,” Barth said. “It was all done outside around a fire telling stories.”

By teaching using methods from the past, Barth hopes his small group of students will help make a better society in the future. 

“It would be really great for society for a shift to happen,” Barth said. “For more people to be connected to nature.”