Young Pioneers Nature Program
About Our Program
At Young Pioneers children immerse in outdoor experiential learning on a six-acre family farm. As they explore ponds, gardens, and trails full of native and pollinator attracting flowers and food crops, they observe the cycles and interconnectedness of nature.
Our programs utilize Forest School, Waldorf, and STEAM principles. Using curriculum inspired by Rutabaga Education and the seasonal cycles of nature and the farm, experienced teachers develop our curriculum to ensure the learning needs of children in each age group are met in fun and engaging ways. Children play and learn at their level in small groups based on age.
All of our outdoor classrooms and interconnecting trails offer nature infused learning opportunities in the following areas:
Garden & Farm Animals
Caring for Farm Animals and the Children’s Learning Garden foster stewardship of our planet, collaboration between peers, and provide students with hands on experiences. As we learn about the nature around us, we learn respect for it and techniques to protect it. We tend to our compost, observe worms, roly-polies and other bugs as our compost transforms into soil. We plant, grow, and harvest our food and flowers from these gardens to prepare snacks, as well as art from them.
Nature & Exploration
Exploring, investigating, playing, collaborating, and interacting with, their peers and leaders around the farm and on the trails provides valuable lessons in knowledge of local flora and fauna, farming, critical thinking, problem solving, negotiating social situations, self-regulation, and effective communication with others. During active play-- running, jumping, and climbing offers experience in how their bodies move and teaches motor skills
Kitchen & Math
Our Kitchen/Math station features sensory tubs, gardens, play kitchens and farm stand, and a real farm kitchen. Digging, planting, measuring, mixing, cooking, sorting, and matching allow children to dabble in mathematical thinking, spatial relationships, cause and effect experimentation, develop fine motor skills and learn farm to table concepts and cooking.
Around The Tipi
Around the Tipi Learning Center, we practice language arts and social science skills by listening to and sharing stories, learning the local Luiseno tribe’s culture, observing nature, learning letters and new words. Sensory experiences include beading, lacing, weaving, sand drawing, pictographs, sorting, matching, and categorizing and art to develop/refine fine motor skills used in writing. Older students delve deeper into social science and nature topics and work to refine reading, vocabulary, critical thinking and writing skills.
Art in Nature
Artistic and creative expression comes from the natural items we collect, recycle and reuse, the plants we grow and the wildlife we care for as they become subjects of and/or mixed media for our creative art which we display in our outdoor classes, or they take home. Mud painting, vegetable juice painting, weaving, fairy gardens, pressed plants, animal tracks/footprints, bird houses/feeders, bug motels, plant pots are just a few projects we will create.
*Young Pioneers is a drop-off only program.
Our Teachers
All teachers have teaching experience with prior pre-school directors, elementary and secondary school teachers on staff, in addition, to educators with sustainable agricultural degrees and herbalists. Pulling our diversified backgrounds together, we have created Young Pioneers. All teachers have gone thru CPR/training and have been background checked