UK:School for kids is held outdoors all day year round

Dressed in thick weatherproof dungarees, neoprene Hunter boots, woolly hats, and toting Deuter backpacks complete with integral-insulated sitting-mat for lunchtime, the children evidently don’t notice the weather. The only time anyone mentions temperature all day is to exclaim “I’m a bit hot now”, after a bit of energetic drumming on a pile of logs. It is 3C (37F) and there is ice on the ground from a recent snowfall. The children will be outside all day. “Small children don’t notice the weather,” says Cathy Bache, 48, a former drama teacher who started the Secret Garden nursery in September last year after four years as an increasingly outdoor-bound child minder. She now has 14 children attending two or three times a week in a wood above a village 15 miles from St Andrews. Because of the high staff/child ratio, the cost of Secret Garden is slightly more than a traditional nursery, at £34 a day per child. For the first time since Bache’s nursery began, she has let a journalist follow the children into the woods to see how they fill their days. The children start to gather in the park of a local village from 8.30am and by 9.30am are beginning the walk up the hill to get into the woods by 10am. Activities are determined largely by what the children want to do. Bache and her assistants may instigate some creativity with nature, but only those who show an interest need to get involved. Most of the time is spent in imaginative freeplay. At 11.30am the children sit on their insulated mats and open their lunchboxes. There is often a lot of discussion about the contents, just as in any nursery. There is more freeplay after lunch and a snack at 2.30pm until the children start their walk back to the village at 4pm and a pick-up between 4.30pm and 5.30pm. “They just play, they don’t have that adult perception that weather is either good or bad,” Bache says. “Last January I woke up to a ferocious gale: a tree had come down in my garden. I thought we might have to keep the children inside. But every parent brought their child prepared for the wind and rain, so we found a sheltered dip in the woods and spent the day playing in it – after the children helped me to saw up the fallen tree.”http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article5308533.ece

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