多田野幼稚園: The Kindergarten with a Secret Base

Why it surfaced

多田野幼稚園’s outdoor curriculum includes making a rice paddy from the soil up, harvesting with traditional tools, playing in mud, and following a path—opened by the principal—to a homemade secret base. Its promise is unusually concrete: children spend their days learning through the landscape rather than merely looking at it.

A kindergarten in Fukushima, Japan, built around full-contact outdoor play in forests, mud, rice fields, and snow.