Children have had the chance to embrace nature and learn about the world around them in Nature Nursery, an eight-week program run by Magic Nature School and presented at Newtown Forest Association’s Holcombe Hill Wildlife Preserve.

Designed for ages 3-5, Nature Nursery takes advantage of the preserve’s several dozen acres of space to get children curious about the great outdoors.

The program blends structured and unstructured learning, where children can play with toys or do sensory activities such as art projects in the classroom. They can then freely explore outside with guided nature walks and observe the wildlife around them.

The goal, says Magic Nature School Founder and Lead Teacher Alexis Slavina, is to foster a love and passion for nature.

“I think as parents or as teachers or as guides, we oftentimes want to push children to take care of nature as something they’re supposed to; that the right thing to do is to protect nature. But before we can ask kids to protect nature, we need to make sure that they love nature, that they appreciate nature,” Slavina told The Newtown Bee on Thursday, October 10.

Magic Nature School creates enrichment programs for kids of various ages across Fairfield County. Slavina said NFA’s is the third or fourth location they have been at, but it’s the one that stuck because it is the school’s first integrated indoor and outdoor space.

Nature Nursery has made its home in one of the buildings at the top of Holcombe Hill Wildlife Preserve. The classroom is situated in the back of the building, and is filled with cozy items to make it feel as welcoming as it does relaxing.

Lining one wall of the room is colorful furniture such as a toy kitchen set, toy washer and dishwasher set, and a shelf with wooden blocks. Another wall has a bookshelf full of fall-themed children’s books, with cute plush animals of sheep, bears, and squirrels sitting on the windowsill above. A large white indoor tent sits next to it with around a dozen pillows inside.

Several large windows and a sliding door are the only things separating the comfy, wooden-walled classroom from the outdoors. The large windows give a chance for sunlight to stream into the classroom. The classroom having such a close “window” into nature is very intentional, according to Slavina.

“The classroom creates the illusion of containment for kids to feel safe while still being so close to the outdoors,” she said. “Like a lot of the toys that we have here, many of them mirror what they play with at home, and so it makes the transition for them going outside really smooth.”

The classroom being so close to the outdoors also makes it easy for Slavina or another instructor to take the kids outside and explore the untouched land of the wildlife preserve.

Having so much open space incorporated into the program additionally lends itself to the free-form nature of the program. Slavina says that they often have a plan of what to do, but might abandon the plan because they discover something cool like deer tracks that create a talking point.

There is also a sparkling pond where Slavina says they do awareness exercises with the kids, listening to sounds, paying attention to smells, and doing tactile activities. One of these activities is a fort situated in a little grove, which everyone has gotten a chance to help create over the course of several Nature Nursery sessions.

The fort acts as their “fun little outdoor classroom” on a nice, warm day according to Slavina, and they will often sit there and read a story together. Other activities include organized craft making, art projects, and child-led play, as well as a designated lunch time. As for activities when they are indoors, there are organized craft and sensory activities such as art projects.

“This is just so memorable for them. It’s so much more stimulating, I think, than sitting in a regular classroom,” Slavina said. “The structure that we have really works, where there is a reliable flow to the day that they can lean on, but there is still so much room for exploring individual interests and asking questions.”

Right Place, Right Time

Magic Nature School is not Slavina’s first time working in an educational setting. According to Slavina, she started working with kids when she was a kid.

She worked in various summer camps when she was around 12 years old, and later her first formal job as a teacher was at a creative learning center in south Florida. Slavina has since continued to work with kids, going on to nanny, babysit, and organize birthday parties, she said.

More recently, she worked for two years at nonprofit nature mentoring organization Two Coyotes Wilderness School, also based in Newtown. It was there, Slavina said, that she really started to get more into environmental education, and helped to spark her interest in combining nature with education.

After her work at Two Coyotes, Slavina says she bounced around a lot between different towns and cities in Fairfield County.

“I circled around Fairfield County, and for a long time, I was looking for something for [ages 3-5], knowing that my vision would be to have an indoor space, easy access outside, a bathroom, and some of the more basic needs that little ones have,” Slavina said.

She and NFA Executive Director Trent McCann were introduced by mutual friends during an event at Holcombe Hill over a year and a half ago, and that was when Slavina noticed what would go on to become the Nature Nursery room.

“So I saw this room, and from how it looked, it was just some kind of dusty storage room … but I instantly had a vision. I saw it and thought, ‘This is it.’ I kind of imagined exactly this,” Slavina said,smiling as she gestured to the room around her. “And from there, the dream was born.”

According to McCann, NFA was not using the room for anything on a regular basis then. The last thing the room was used for, he said, was for a kids nature art program shortly after 12/14. Beyond that, the room had not been used in years as far as he was aware.

“The NFA had an active interest in finding ways to engage children, except we didn’t necessarily have the capacity to do it in-house. So when Alexis and I started talking about it, it made a lot of sense. It just seemed like a good fit,” McCann said.

After officially starting last year, Nature Nursery is currently on its fourth session, or as Slavina says, “season.” McCann says that, in a way, Nature Nursery is collaborative, but that Magic Nature School stands pretty independently of NFA and that Slavina drives the ship in terms of curriculum.

Moving Forward

When talking about Nature Nursery, Slavina said the program is the “culmination of her educational experience.”

In the past year since the program has launched, Slavina has watched many children come into the program who, in other education settings, would be told that they are disadvantaged or put into a box.

“We see those same kids come in here, with their parents worried they might not thrive, and the kids wind up growing so quickly and leave the program as their best selves. And I love to see that. That’s just … it’s the biggest compliment as a teacher,” Slavina said.

She says a lot of invisible learning happens due to the nature of the program, and she is extremely grateful to hear the positive feedback from parents.

Not every child in the program is a Newtown resident. Some families are from surrounding towns and cities, with some even traveling from New York.

“It’s just been really sweet,” Slavina said. The children “all came together as strangers, effectively, but now have playdates and meetups outside of class multiple times a week.”

Slavina does not want the program to grow too much, she said. While she says she knows that sounds counterintuitive, she feels there is something magical in watching the kids cultivate friendship among themselves and seeing them grow from season to season. As she says, growing might mean that the more immediate, close-knit nature of the program would likely change.

That is why she and McCann feel that they have hit a “sweet spot” with Nature Nursery. Even during the interview with The Newtown Bee, kids were still running around and shouting outside after that day’s session of the program. As McCann said, if he gets to hear people laughing and enjoying the space, “that’s why the space exists.”

“With the NFA, we’re not just looking to grow the program for the sake of it either. We really like working with [Slavina] and Magic Nature School, and I don’t think you could necessarily just replace that with any other enrichment program,” McCann said. “I think we hit a sweet spot.”

For more information about Magic Nature School, visit their website at magicnatureschool.com. For more information about Newtown Forest Association, visit newtownforestassociation.org.

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Reporter Jenna Visca can be reached at jenna@thebee.com.