SATURDAYS | Autumn | Full Season

Service Description

What is Flora's Forest Friends? Join Miss Flora and her Forest Friends for sensory play & outdoor learning! Designed for children ages 2-8, this mixed-age program encourages child-led exploration and boasts music, stories, crafts, kid-friendly science experiments, and more throughout the session all in a natural setting at Lost River Cave! This nature program is offered by early childhood educator, Flora Nye, in partnership with Lost River Cave. The program features eight, hour-long classes per session where children and their caregivers meet as a group with Miss Flora in LRC's Nature Explore Playscape to learn about local flora and fauna, participate in a group activity, and have guided free play to bring their own ideas about the group activity to life! Why mixed-ages? Mixed-age play and exploration is beneficial for humans of all ages! Younger children are introduced to ways of thinking they may not have come up with on their own by watching older children play, while the older children get to practice skills such as patience, teamwork, empathy, and gentleness when they’re around the littles. These skills are critical to becoming kind, helpful humans! What's the class size? I like to keep the class size small at 10 full session enrollees! I also offer five slots for drop-in attendees- those who only come to a few classes of the session and pay for individual classes. How does curriculum coincide with the needs of littles and older children? This curriculum is designed to be altered on-the-go depending on the ages attending the program that day. All minds are unique and work in their own way, so when we invite children as a group to solve a problem or complete a task, they're most likely going to think of solutions that vary from those of their peers. When we come together and bring all of our differing ideas to the table, we can come up with a truly fascinating solution!