New location, expanded services at outdoor preschool

After being forced to take a five-month break during COVID-19, the outdoor preschool Bravely Return to the Earth is gearing up to open its metaphorical doors again this September.

For parents struggling with decisions about school this year, the nature-based preschool nicknamed Breathe (Bravely Return to the Earth and Teach Holistic Education) has one major selling point: It’s run totally outdoors. This, coupled with the toll of isolation, distance learning and working from home, has caused an influx of interest in the program, according to Breathe owner Jenn Feingold.

“It serves people doing home school or virtual learning from public school,” Feingold said. “Remote learning is only a couple hours a day, and a lot of parents are still working from home, so they’re trying to find an outlet for their kids to get some safe socialization and some supplemental education.”

The mission of the preschool is to use nature to inspire learning. With a focus on self-reliance skills, empathy and cooperation, kids spend every day outside, no matter the weather. Subjects range from plants, animals, cooking, gardening, yoga and insects to reading, math, music and history.

Learning takes place through singing songs, solving mysteries, listening to books read aloud, cooking food, romping in the fields, playing games and generally getting to know the land. Feingold said it’s important to expose kids to nature because it nurtures resiliency and confidence.

“I’ve heard from parents that kids who would always need their hand held when they were outside are now running ahead of the family like, ‘Come on, lets go!’” Feingold said. “I’ve also heard of a lot of kids correctly identifying plants and trees and animals, which dumbfounds parents who weren’t raised like that.”

The preschool is for kids aged 3 to 7 years, but this year, Breathe is offering POD programs for kids aged 7 through 12 and teens 13 through 15. PODs function as supplemental education for school-aged kids and will consist of kids who want to learn in small groups from an instructor. POD subjects will be mostly determined by need and interest.

“The POD programs are coming out of the ideas I’ve had for an after-school program serving kids who attend public school,” Feingold said. “But because of COVID, it’s really kind of opened up the opportunity for parents to seek alternative solutions for learning.”

Breathe also just secured a new location at Van Noble Farms on Podunk Road. The farm is owned by Devon Van Noble and is home to pigs, veggies, woods and a commercial kitchen, which will all serve as classrooms for attendees.

The influx of interest may be a turning point for the small organization, which is a project 10 years in the making for Feingold. In 2010, armed with a lifelong love of animals and the outdoors, as well as deep fears about future ecological devastation, she enrolled in college in Connecticut as a biology major in 2010, only to leave after just two years.

“I thought that being a biologist would allow me to be part of the solution,” Feingold said. “But what I actually found out was it’s not a scientist’s job to help fix a situation. I was just documenting the decline of the environment, and I felt kind of hopeless.”

After taking two years off to travel and work at summer camps, she said an idea started to form. Feingold went back to school for elementary education.

“I started to think about my heroes like Jane Goodall and Steve Irwin, people that I grew up idolizing,” Feingold said. “And I noticed that they focused on education. So, I started thinking, how can I take what I learned in that scientist mindset and shift that toward education?”

After school, Feingold said she yearned to create a new model of teaching that included more empathy between students and teachers and more of a connection to the natural world. After graduating in 2015, she searched for a year-round program that taught academics in an outdoor setting, relocated to Trumansburg and ended up at Primitive Pursuits in Ithaca.

She participated in Primitive Pursuits’ AmeriCorps program, did its summer internship and eventually got hired as a lead field instructor. She said the experience gave her the confidence to eventually create her own program.

Each year, enrollment has increased at Breathe, with lots of happy parents and kids. Calina Mayo of Mecklenburg sent her daughter Evangeline, now 5 years old, to a previous Breathe session and said that she loved it.

Mayo intends to home school her daughter this year and has signed her up for the fall session with Breathe because she herself wishes she was more connected to nature and hopes to instill that connection for Evangeline at a young age.

“I really want her to be like, ‘There’s no bad weather; you just dress for it,’” Mayo said. “It was always nonstop when she got home telling me about the stuff they did: ‘We made a campfire. We made fairy houses. The teacher brought sausages, and we cooked them over the fire, and there’s a cat.’”

This year, Alex Van Nostrand, a friend Feingold met while at Primitive Pursuits, will join the Breathe team as an instructor. Van Nostrand spent the last 3 1/2 years at sea working for Lindblad-National Geographic as an assistant expedition leader, but due to COVID, she’s returned home for the time being. She also co-founded and directed a nature home-school program called Wild Child Freeschool in the Bay Area in California, making her a great fit for Breathe.

This year, Breathe will send out a COVID-19 health and safety plan to all parents, as well as an agreement and waiver. Feingold said they will have to alter the curriculum because so many of their usual activities require close contact and working together.

Feingold and Van Nostrand plan to run the preschool and PODs on their own, but more instructors may be needed based on interest level from the community. In the future, Feingold hopes to register Breathe as a nonprofit, with her long-term sights set on making the model adaptable to many different communities.

“It would be great if somewhere like Ovid had their own program,” Feingold said. “There is nothing besides public school in Ovid. Getting out to communities like that to help them form their own outdoor education programs is my dream.”