What Is Kidwings?

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 3-12 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 immerssion, stories (nurturing and healing), movement (yoga moves), creative art, mindfulness (breathing), socio-emotional intelligence and music (we sing songs as we dance with the flowers and trees).

We Also Integrate:

  • Nature Curriculum

  • Wild Math curriculum

  • Wild Literacy

  • STEAM

  • Local fauna and flora identification

  • Hiking/Wilderness exploration

  • Mindfulness and Socio-Emotional Learning

  • Nature Art

  • Spanish Immersion days!

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.

“Let’s Raise Children Who Won’t Have To Recover From Their Childhoods.”

Pam Leo

We Grow Up Playing In Nature

“Children need play, they NEED play to develop well. It’s not a luxury, it’s not something that we should regard as recess or a break from learning it IS learning.”

- Peter Gray

“The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.”

- Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

What is Nature Deficit Disorder?

The term Nature-Deficit Disorder® was introduced in 2005 with the publication of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.” is a description of the human costs of alienation from nature and it is not meant to be a medical diagnosis (although perhaps it should be), but as a way to talk about an urgent problem that many of us knew was growing, but had no language to describe it. The term caught on, and is now a rallying cry for an international movement to connect children to rest of nature. Since then, this New Nature Movement has broadened to include adults and whole communities.