Childminders are obliged to take part in regular training courses. With this new format, they were given the opportunity for the first time to get to know the forest as a place of learning and experience together with their daycare children. As many childminders are very busy during the week, the event was deliberately designed as a hybrid program: Content for the adults flowed directly into shared forest experiences with the children. "Especially with very young children under the age of three, you need a lot of sensitivity. The main focus here is on sensory experiences and the chance to experience and learn to love the forest," explains Florian Elsässer, forester and state-certified forest educator at the Ludwigsburg district authority.
Experience the forest with all your senses - tips for adults, games for children
The adults received practical tips on safety, choosing suitable forest locations and materials that will enable even the youngest children to have a successful day in the forest. At the same time, the children were able to discover the forest through play: In forest bingo, the children looked for typical objects from the forest, went in search of hidden forest dwellers, felt various animal skins, made a forest postcard and experienced the forest from unusual perspectives - for example by looking into the leaf canopy with a mirror. Educational approaches such as Pikler's pedagogy were vividly applied to the forest experience.
The feedback was consistently positive and the childminders went home with new ideas. The participants are motivated to engage even more intensively with forest education and the content of the certificate program in the future. To round off the morning successfully, some childminders had prepared a picnic in the forest for their children - a relaxed end to the day, during which some of the little forest explorers fell asleep contentedly on the picnic blanket.
