Nature School

KIDWINGS is a 100% outdoor nature/forest Kindergarten, summer camp and Homeschool enrichment program located in beautiful sunny San Diego. Operating year-round, KW offers half-day programming for ages 3-11 and a memorable nature camp experience in the summer months. We offer enrichment classes across the Central area of San Diego. Our foundation is based on the Scandinavian Forest School model, taking the best of each alternative educational model like Waldorf, Reggio Emilia and Montessori.

Kidwings is a magical “classroom” with the sky as its roof, where kids have wings to fly with the freedom to explore and be themselves. Our goal is to make children connect with their hearts through nature, free play, and creativity. We provide a loving space that supports children’s wellbeing through nature stories (nurturing and healing), movement (yoga moves), creative art, meditation (breathing), and music (we sing songs as we dance with the flowers and trees).

We aim to help children with life lessons and skills that will help them develop self-confidence and self-love to navigate life’s challenges with greater understanding – of themselves and others – and greater resilience.

Every day we provide the appropriate tools and environment where kids can become aware and connected to their own body, manage their emotions, trust their instincts, have compassion for others, take care of mother earth, and be genuine communicators. In Kidwings we stimulate creativity and imagination as we develop the innate value of each child as a unique expression of love, generating self-awareness, spiritual connection, and physical and emotional health.

Our program offers Spanish where children develop the skills to understand a different language, improving their cognitive abilities, memory, attention, and decision-making skills among other advantages.

Kidwings is for anyone, who has faith in the process. Current research suggests that introducing academic instruction to children before they are ready actually slows down learning. This does not mean that we won’t make connections, practice storytelling, use natural elements to engineer forts and swings, learn scientific names, track animals, count, and make art. Sorting leaves by color or making patterns with them is a pre-math skill; storytelling and drawing shapes with sticks promotes literacy; rich, reciprocal dialogue hones language development. It simply means that a play-based curriculum is not at the expense of children’s work, but rather it is the children’s work.

Allowing children a childhood rich with free play time lays the groundwork for a lifetime of creativity, confidence, and connection. It is difficult to suspend the traditional Western belief that more concentrated academic efforts early on is better; at Kidwings we simply believe that the best investment, both in a child’s academic future and in their overall well-being, lies in letting them learn through play.

More than ever, with the development of new technologies, children require real experiences. A child should learn what a flower is by seeing it in the field, observing it in its context, with its leaves, branches and plants surrounding it, discover that one day it was born and that over time it loses its colors.