Last summer, Taira Restar cleared a portion of a three-acre wooded lot in Inverness Park and tied small blue flags to mark the boundaries of her new venture: Emerald Heart Forest School.
The site features a nature trail, a mud kitchen, a fairy village, a hand washing station, a potty, a shed for storage and a tarped overhang. Among the few toys on hand are magnifying glasses, crayons and paper, fairies and kitchen utensils. Ten students ages 3 to 6 travel from Inverness, Point Reyes Station, Bolinas, Terra Linda and Mill Valley to attend three half-days a week of the entirely outdoor program.
It’s a vision come to fruition for Taira, but it’s not her first. She ran a nature-based program for preschool-aged children in Point Reyes Station, called Playgarden, in the mid-1990s, and she started a version of Emerald Heart in 2019 in Fairfax. When the pandemic hit, that program turned entirely outdoors, and she searched for a spot closer to her home of Inverness. She’s worked with children and expressive arts therapy for over 35 years.
“My approach has shifted as I’ve matured,” she said. “I don’t have to come and jump in and teach them something: They’re already doing a lot. I totally trust them, I trust play. I trust that they’re learning with what’s interesting to them right now.”
Taira says her program is place-based, and that outdoor education is the way of the future. There’s plenty of time for teaching kids about what’s out there in the rest of the world—letters, snow, and kangaroos. A child’s experimental and inquisitive nature lends itself to hands-on outdoor learning, like pushing a log up a hill and watching it roll down.
On rainy days, kids are suited up in rain gear and Taira brings hot tea for them. Jennifer MacGregor Dennis, a parent from Bolinas, said she grew up in Scotland and wanted her daughter to be okay in all weathers. “It’s raining, go outside and play!” she said.
“Outside, the kids are able to express themselves in ways that they wouldn’t be able to within four walls,” Ms. Dennis said. “Running and screaming would be overwhelming within a classroom. In the outdoors, you’re able to let children be children.”
When Taira moved Emerald Heart to Inverness Park last year, Ms. Dennis opened her own outdoor program in Fairfax, called A Wilder Harmony. But her 3-year-old daughter attends Emerald Heart.
“I trust her immensely with my daughter,” Ms. Dennis said. “Taira is an expert at communication and helping these young people find their ways, set boundaries, convey their needs and express themselves in a way that will serve them for the rest of their lives.”
Laughty Nixdorf, a parent from Inverness, says her 5-year-old would stay outside from sunup to sundown if he could, making Emerald Heart a perfect fit.
“He hasn’t really gone to preschool before, so this transition is best for our family,” she said. “He’s more confident in leadership now. I’m not sure if it’s his age or the school, but he’s more confident out in the world and in nature.”
On a recent morning at Emerald Heart, two children held onto the trunk of a coffeeberry bush and bounced on low-hanging branches. When a third wanted to join, they began to quibble.
“How could we work this out, friends, anybody have an idea?” Taira asked as she joined the group. “You could take turns or stand there together.”
“No!” one of the children said.
“You want to be there alone,” Taira responded. “It doesn’t work to push her with our bodies. It doesn’t work, my friend.”
She paused.
“Let’s sing the tree-climbing song and when the song is over it will be someone else’s turn. Do you want to sing with me?”
“Climbing up the coffeeberry tree,
Climbing up under a sky that’s clear,
Climbing up the coffeeberry tree,
All in the winter, in the winter time of year,
Climbing up up up the coffeeberry,
All in the winter time of year.”
The children on the branches quietly sang and watched Taira, and then one said, “Do you want to climb up this one?” She made space for the third child.
“Wow I really like that, friends,” Taira said as the child moved onto the branch. Then she quietly stepped away.
Moving Emerald Heart to Inverness Park has been like coming home, she said.
“I’m very curious and committed to children’s inner landscape and helping them articulate what’s going on, to be able to find that vocabulary and then be able to express it. That’s in service of confidence building, self-esteem, self-worth and all the things,” she said.
Taira’s work harkens back to her time a decade ago at the Tamalpa Institute, where she taught training programs and public workshops in dance and nature.
“When I was working with adults, so often someone would say, ‘I wasn’t nurtured as a child, I wasn’t seen, I wasn’t heard as a child,’” she said. “Now I’m in a situation where I can hopefully make a little difference in each of these children’s lives so when they’re in their late 30s or early 40s, they won’t say that I wasn’t seen or heard as a child.”
As a child herself growing up in Southern California, Taira said she taught art classes to the neighborhood kids.
“I like being an entrepreneur,” she said.
Taira knew she was taking on some risk when she moved her program to West Marin, where there are fewer families. But so far things are working out. She has a full enrollment, at $799 per month per child, and has plans to set up both a scholarship program and a gear closet so any child who’s a fit for the program can attend. For now, she has help from assistant teachers Qian Wang and Stephanie Ormsby.
All teachers at Emerald Heart are vaccinated and boosted, and although they wore masks earlier in the pandemic, currently she does not require children, parents or teachers to do so.
“It’s really important for children to see other people’s faces and to see a teacher’s mouth when she’s talking and the nuances of her face when she’s reading,” she said. “I’m really honoring this new set of children who have grown up so far in a pandemic. For some, they’re away from their parents for the first time and because of the pandemic they haven’t been around anybody but their own family. It’s not even the big deal it used to be to be away from Mom—now it’s so much more intense. We want to be sensitive and caring as we welcome in and hold space for this very unique moment in these children’s lives.”
Walking through the clearing that is the school, Taira picks up an owl feather. She examines its edge for the little silencers and then puts it on a tray of other found treasures. It will wait there until a child comes to inspect it with a magnifying glass.
To learn more about Emerald Heart Forest School, visit www.emeraldheartkids.com.