The Earth School
at Fauna Forest Farm
Application to enroll for 2024-2025:
2024-2025 Program Options
Fauna Scouts
Ages: 4-6
Schedule: September-May
Option A: 1 day per week (Mon, Tues, or Wed)
Option B: 2 days per week
NEW! Option C: 3 days per week (Mon-Wed)
Time: 9:00 am - 3:00 pm
Tuition per month:
$200 for 1 day/week
$370 for 2 days/week
$570 for 3 days/week
*Fees:
$50 One-Time Enrollment Fee
$50 Annual Site Infrastructure & Maintenance, & Materials Fee (per family)
Fauna Trackers
Ages: 6-9
Schedule: September - May
Option A: 2 days per week (Mon & Wed)
Option B: 2 day per week (Tues & Thurs)
Option C: 1 day per week (Mon, Wed, Tues or Thurs)
Time: 8:45 am - 2:45 pm
Tuition per month:
$200 for 1 day/week
$370 for 2 days/week
*Fees:
$50 One-Time Enrollment Fee
$50 Annual Site Infrastructure & Maintenance, & Materials Fee (per family)
Fauna Naturalists
Ages: 10-14
Schedule: September - May
1 day per week (Thurs)
Time: 9:00 am - 3:00 pm
Tuition per month:
$200 for 1 day/week
*Fees:
$50 One-Time Enrollment Fee
$50 Annual Site Infrastructure & Maintenance, & Materials Fee per family
Join the Wait list for 2025 or later:
"Choosing The Earth School at Fauna Forest Farm has proven to be one of the best decisions my family has made.
It’s so exciting to see my child develop under the instructors’ unflagging support and patience, and to hear about the wondrous experiences he has every day at school. The first thing he says when he jumps out of bed every morning is “Do I get to go to outdoor school today?!” Earth School’s focus on connection and understanding have nurtured his social, physical, and intellectual growth in ways that I don’t think would be possible in a traditional preschool. He already knows more about nature than I do!
I have been so impressed by Fauna Forest Farm’s organization, clear communication, and genuine care & kindness for the families in their program. I feel incredibly fortunate to have found them."
— Earth School Parent
About the Earth School
The Earth School at Fauna Forest Farm focuses on holistic, experiential, project and play-based learning within a farm and forest context. Our focus is on the cultivation of critical thinking skills, ecological identity, social and emotional intelligence, and fine and gross motor skills. Our approach is child-led, and we tailor students’ experiences and projects in a way that deepens their inquiries and curiosities as they arise. Through project-based learning, we integrate the natural sciences, music, art, history, math, and literacy.
Project-based learning at the Earth School is centered on the following educational areas:
Animal stewardship
Food growing
Culinary arts
Crafting and construction
Wilderness/primitive skills
Ecology studies
Land healing and regeneration practices
Music
Creative and artistic expression
As a program, we are committed to the education of the whole child. We believe that children thrive in mind, body, and spirit when they are able to track, identify, and respond to their physical and emotional landscape with attunement, skillfulness, and resilience. We integrate body-centered wellness practices which may include yoga, “fox walking,” grounding practices involving the five senses, dance, or a game-based approach to engaging fine and gross motor skills. We are passionate about creating opportunities for children to establish meaningful relationships with each other and the instructors- and also with animals, plants, and the life of the landscape - what some naturalists and nature-based educators refer to as the “more-than-human world.” We believe that children learn best when they feel deeply connected to their educational experiences and when they learn within a nurturing environment that fosters a felt sense of belonging.
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Food Production
Vegetable & herb gardening (planning, planting, maintaining, harvesting, and preserving)
Fruit and nut tree planting and care
Plant propagation (rooting cuttings and grafting)
Mushroom log innoculation
Maple syrup production
Wild-tending and foraging
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Animal Tending
Regenerative chicken care
Rotational grazing
Bird and bat habitat creation
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Culinary Arts
Food preparation (washing, cutting, processing)
Reading and following recipes (measuring, timing, order of operations)
Traditional and modern cooking methods
Creation of a cob oven for pizza making and bread baking
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Primitive Skills
Knot tying
Shelter and base camp construction
Woodworking
Plant identification
Fire safety
Map and compass navigation
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Ecological Observation
Anatomy, life cycles, and habitats of the plant kingdom
Anatomy, life cycles, habitats, diets, and migration patterns of the animal kingdom
Tracking the sun’s changing arc and it’s relation to the seasons
Tracking rain fall and temperature
Place-based soil and geology studies
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Skills for wellness and lifelong thriving
Mindfulness practices
Emotion tracking, identification, and regulation
Assertive communication
Body awareness skills
Conflict resolution skills
Nutrition
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Entrepreneurship
• Egg Sales
• Fauna Kids Farmers Market
• Plant Nursery Project
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Nature Based Art + Crafts
Candle Making
Birdhouses
Handmade Instruments
Natural Jewelry Making
Natural Dyes
Sculpting
Rock Art
Sewing and Hand Work
Painting
ABOUT THE DIRECTORS: OUR STORY
Shae and Taylor met in 2013 when both were amidst deep personal inquiry about their life path and how to live in a way that is regenerative, rather than destructive, to our planet home. Their separate paths led them to come into greater awareness of the environmental crises of our time and how these crises are impacting human, animal, and plant communities. In particular, they were concerned about the impact these realities would have on young people as they looked to the future of our planet.
A shared vision for their community soon took root. Shae joined Taylor as part of Build It Up’s leadership team where they support efforts to restore connection with local food by empowering community members with the skills, tools, seeds, plants, and knowledge needed to grow their own food (https://arcd.org/build-it-up/).
Shae developed children’s workshops at Build It Up events that included young children in the educational food growing journey with their family, and in 2016, Shae and Taylor developed the weekly Sowing Seeds food forest program for youth ages 3-12. This program focused on teaching food growing, primitive skills, emotional literacy, nutrition, entrepreneurship, construction, and garden-to-table culinary skills. They also began hosting Food Forest Fridays at the Mountain Home Food Forest. These events were an inspiration for them, as they experienced the large turnouts for such a small urban lot, that revealed to them just how many in the community shared in this vision. And so the dream of a farm in service to the community was born, where children and people of all ages could come to experience growth, learning, and healing in deep connection with nature.
In 2016, while co-directing the Sowing Seeds program, Shae and Taylor also began working in wilderness therapy, a field in which Shae continues to lead trainings for guides and instructors, and serves as a Program Developer. While working as wilderness therapy guides, Shae and Taylor mentored young people on wilderness expedition skills, fire safety, friction fire, knot-tying, shelter-building, and nature-based skills supportive of emotional regulation, psycho-spiritual wellness, and trauma recovery. This work inspired Shae to pursue her Masters in Counseling, which she completed in May 2022, and also to co-develop the ETSU Nature-Based Therapy Certificate with Dr. Bethany Novotny during her graduate studies.
In 2017, Shae and Taylor became a part of the Southeastern Forest School Association to learn more about how to design new nature-connected educational models for our region and to integrate more of the forest school model into the ongoing Sowing Seeds food forest program. From 2019 to the Spring of 2022, Shae is grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Micky Morton in co-founding and co-directing Seedkeepers Forest School. During this time, Taylor worked as a timber framer to learn the ancient art of timber frame construction, in hopes that, if they were one day able to steward a farm, he would have the ability to build structures on it as needed.
After ten years of searching for avenues to access farmland that could be restored and protected for generations to come, it is the dream of a lifetime for them to have the unexpected opportunity to steward Fauna Forest Farm and to create a space that we hope reveals to young people a vision of thriving earth and community. The Earth School is the flower of a long-held dream— that the separation from nature that our modern-day culture presents will not keep children from coming to find a sense of place and home in nature, which was much more commonly true for generations prior. We envision a cultural reunion between children and the natural world. We envision children growing into adolescence and young adulthood with the skills, knowledge, and inner resources to know how to live upon the earth regeneratively and to have the capacity to meet their needs well with the incredible resources the natural world provides. Equally important, the dream of the Earth School is that young people come to know their inherent belonging in the web of all of life, and that this connection becomes a source of lifelong nurturance: that when they feel lost, they can follow the wild trails they came to know in childhood, and find their way back home.
"The song you heard singing in the leaf when you were a child is singing still. I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four, And the leaf is still singing."
-Mary Oliver
Meet the Earth School Instructors
At the Earth School, we believe in the importance of the family/caregivers having a bridge into the child’s world and what the child is experiencing on the farm and in the forest. We are exploring the idea of offering an Earth School program, structured as workshops for adults which would create an opportunity for parents/guardians, family members, and community members to attend workshops focused on developing skills in similar areas as the children attending the Earth School will be learning, such as Plant ID, primitive fire-making, permaculture, maple-syrup making, grafting, mushroom inoculation, etc. If this is of interest to you, please click below to fill out a short form to help us gauge if this is of interest in the community.
Fauna Farm to Family Program
A Note on the Fauna Forest Access Fund: Accessibility to experiences of deep nature-connection, regardless of socioeconomic status, is a core value at the Earth School. If you are someone seeking scholarship support to help make it possible to enroll in one of our programs, please feel free to reach out to us to find out more information about scholarship availability at: faunaforestfarm@gmail.com
If you are interested in nature-based programs for children in East Tennessee you may also be interested in looking into this program in our area directed by Micky Morton:
Seedkeepers Forest School
https://www.seedkeepersforestschool.org