dissertation by Peter Häfner at Heidelberg University showed that graduates of German forest kindergartens had a “clear advantage” over the graduates of regular kindergartens, performing better in cognitive and physical ability, as well as in creativity and social development. Toys, typically disparaged at waldkitas, are replaced by the imaginative use of sticks, rocks and leaves.
Most have opened in the last 15 years and are usually located in the city’s parks, with a bare-bones structure serving as a sort of home base, but others, like Robin Hood, rely on public transportation to shuttle their charges daily out into the wilderness, where they spend most of the day, regardless of weather. Robin Hood Waldkindergarten, which opened in 2005, is one of more than 1,500 waldkitas, or “forest kindergartens,” in Germany Berlin alone has about 20.
Everyone was deposited at the entrance of an 84-acre public park and proceeded to run amok. The children continued to chatter until the public bus came, at which point they wordlessly formed a single-file line and climbed in. (The remaining children, who were younger, stayed in the park.) A woman named Christa Baule led the way, carrying a backpack with a three-foot-long branch sticking dangerously out of it Peters took up the back. The circle then dissolved and the group’s 15 older children, ranging in age from 3 to 6, marched past a community garden and toward a busy intersection. A spirited round of songs, sung in both English and German, began and was finished off by a chorus of wolf howls. They smiled absent-mindedly and took sips of coffee from environmentally friendly stainless steel to-go cups.Īt the sound of the bird call, mimicked loudly and with eerie accuracy by a man in his early 40s named Picco Peters, the children gathered together and formed a tight circle. Their parents, shivering and anxious to get on with the day, paid them little mind.
They ran in circles, shrieked with delight and spent a great deal of time rolling around atop frozen soil as traffic whizzed by just meters away. The sky was gray and the ground was gray, but the children’s cheeks were bright and so were their moods. ONE EARLY MORNING this past February, before the frost melted or the sun fully rose, 20 small children gathered in a scabby municipal park in Pankow, the northernmost borough of Berlin.
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