ONE Forest School

09/03/2026

EVERY DROP BEGINS HERE 💧

Yesterday morning we headed back down to the creek with one of our solar-powered aerators. After seeing how many minnows, tadpoles and other little aquatic creatures were crowded into the last remaining pool of water the day before, we thought we might be able to keep the water oxygenated and give them a little help while we waited for rain.

Unfortunately, when we got there, the water had dropped again. What had been a small pool the day before was now barely more than a shallow mud puddle, and there simply wasn't enough water left to use the aerator.

As you can probably imagine, the children were pretty sad about it. They sat along the edge looking for movement and searching the mud and remaining water for anything that might still need help. These children know this creek very well. They have spent countless hours swimming in it, building in it, turning over rocks, catching and releasing critters and discovering all of the things that call a little forest creek home. Watching it disappear over the course of just a few days has been difficult for them—and, truthfully, for the adults too.

We can't make it rain, and as much as the children would probably be perfectly happy to form a bucket brigade and start hauling water into the forest, we can't refill a spring-fed creek either. 🤓 What we can do is use this experience to think a little more carefully about the water we still have.

That's especially important here in Bedford County, where so many of us rely on wells. Most days we turn on the faucet, water comes out, and we don't give much thought to how much we're actually using.

A drought like this is a pretty good reminder that our water supply isn't endless, even when everything inside our homes appears perfectly normal.

So we're going to start looking for some easy ways to conserve water at school and at home, and we'd love for our families and community to do the same. We can turn off the faucet while brushing our teeth instead of letting it run, wait until we have a full load before running the washing machine or dishwasher, take five minute showers, and pay attention to all those other little ways water disappears down the drain without us really thinking about it.

And because we work with children, we might as well start with the water-saving rule they're almost guaranteed to remember:

When it's yellow, let it mellow; when it's brown, flush it down! 😂🚽

Yes, we're actually going there.

It sounds silly, but that's rather the point. Conserving water during a drought doesn't have to mean frightening children—or adults—with everything that could go wrong. It can simply mean understanding what's happening around us and making some thoughtful changes while we wait for conditions to improve.

Our creek is going to remain off limits to play for now so that whatever aquatic life is still hanging on has the remaining water to itself. The children can visit, observe and keep watch over it, and I'm quite certain they will. In the meantime, we'll keep learning about where our water comes from, where it goes, how our wells and waterways are connected, and what all of us can do to take a little less when nature doesn't have much to spare.

And we'll keep hoping for rain.

Every Drop Begins Here. 💧

09/02/2026

EVERY DROP BEGINS HERE 💧

We’ve used the phrase Every Drop Begins Here before at ONE Forest School when teaching our children about watersheds and helping them understand that the little creek running through our forest is connected to a much larger system of water. What happens to water here doesn’t stay here. It continues downstream, joining other creeks and streams along the way, eventually making its way toward the Atlantic Ocean.

Yesterday morning, that lesson became much more real than I ever wanted it to.

A natural spring has fed the creek running through our property for more than sixty years. We’ve seen it high, low, muddy, frozen and reduced during dry summers, but we have never known it to stop flowing completely. Yesterday, when we took the children down to the creek, much of the creek bed was dry.

The children were devastated.

Their swimming hole, where they have spent countless hours wading, splashing, turning over rocks and discovering what lives beneath the water, had been reduced to little more than a puddle. Once they realized what had happened, their first concern was for the animals. They began searching the remaining wet areas for anything that might have been stranded as the water disappeared. They were able to rescue several water-breathing snails and a few tadpoles, but there simply wasn’t much left to find.

Farther downstream, we still have one small pool of water remaining. More than a hundred minnows and dozens of tadpoles are crowded into it, along with whatever other aquatic life has managed to find refuge there. For now, that part of the creek is off limits to play. Tomorrow the children will help us set up our solar aerators to give the animals remaining there the best chance we can while we wait and hope for rain.

I’m sharing all of this because I think it’s time for us to start talking more seriously about water in our community—not to frighten anyone and certainly not to create panic, but because many of us in Bedford County depend on wells for the water we use every single day. When we turn on a faucet and water comes out, it can be easy to forget that our supply is not unlimited.

Over the next several weeks, we’re going to use Every Drop Begins Here to talk about that. We’ll look at where our water comes from, how groundwater, springs, creeks and larger waterways are connected, where the water flowing through our little forest eventually goes, and what ordinary families can realistically do to conserve water while our area continues to experience drought.

Some of those things will be serious. Some will be incredibly simple. And knowing us, a few will probably be a little silly. 🤓

Yesterday, though, the children gave us the best place to begin.

They didn't need anyone to explain to them that water is precious. They walked down to a place they love, saw that the water was gone, and immediately began looking for the creatures that needed their help.

For today, maybe that's enough of a lesson.

Every Drop Begins Here. 💧

08/30/2026

One of the things I have learned from teaching in the forest is that children don't arrive with the same experiences, and that can make teaching a little complicated some days. Give four children the same materials, the same space and the same opportunity, and you may very well get four completely different experiences.

That's not a problem to solve. That's where the learning begins.

I see it all the time when we study birds. Some of our children have spent a great deal of their lives outdoors. They can hear a bird call and know exactly who made it. They know where to look for salamanders, which logs are worth investigating, and when a bird is making an alarm call instead of simply singing. They have developed what I sometimes call “nature smarts,” not because someone sat them down and taught them all of these things, but because they have spent enough time outside observing, exploring, getting dirty, making mistakes and paying attention.

Other children come to us having had very different experiences. They may have spent considerably less time wandering through the woods or simply being outside without an adult directing what they should be doing. The first time I ask everyone to stop and listen to the birds, they may not recognize a single call.

Neither child should be made to feel that they're in the wrong place.

I don't want the child who already recognizes an Eastern Phoebe to be bored while I explain something they learned years ago, but I certainly don't want the child hearing that phoebe for the first time to feel as though everyone else knows something they should already know. So we start with what each child brings with them and go from there.

For one child, the discovery that morning may simply be realizing that all of those sounds coming from the trees aren't just random chirping. Different birds make different sounds, and if we listen long enough, we can begin to recognize them. The child who already knows it's a phoebe gets a different question. How did you know? What is the bird doing? Why is it behaving that way? What does that behavior tell us about what might be happening somewhere else in the forest?

They can be standing beside one another, listening to the exact same bird, and having two completely different learning experiences. Neither experience is more important than the other because both children are moving forward from where they began.

And really, that's what is happening in this photograph, too. Four children, the same forest, the same pile of pots and pans and the same opportunity to make an absolutely ridiculous amount of noise. 😂 But look at them. Each child is experiencing that moment differently, contributing differently and getting something different from it. Nobody needs to be doing it exactly like the child standing beside them for the experience to have value.

I think we sometimes get so caught up in making education equal that we confuse equality with sameness. Children don't need us to pretend they all walked through the door carrying the same knowledge, experiences, abilities or interests. They need us to pay enough attention to figure out what they already know, what they're ready to discover, and how we can help them take the next step without making anyone feel behind or holding anyone else back.

Maybe that's what equity in education really looks like. Not giving every child the same experience, but making sure every child has somewhere meaningful to go next.

🌱 Rooted at ONE

08/28/2026

I've had several conversations with parents lately about something that I think we need to talk about more often: boundaries.

Parenting is hard, and somewhere along the way I think some parents have gotten the message that being a good parent means constantly meeting every need, preventing every disappointment and keeping their children happy. Before they realize what's happened, they're exhausted, their children are running the household, and they're wondering why something that they love so much has become so difficult.

So I'm going to say something that I've said to more than one parent over the years: You are not a jungle gym, a punching bag or your child's personal servant. 🤓

It really is okay to set reasonable boundaries with your children. In fact, they need you to.

Children need to learn that they can want something and still hear no. They can be angry without hitting someone. They can wait while an adult finishes a conversation, carry something they're perfectly capable of carrying, clean up a mess they've made, entertain themselves for a while and sometimes do something simply because it is part of being a member of a family. None of those expectations are unreasonable, and none of them will damage your relationship with your child.

Your child may be unhappy about a boundary, and that's okay. Their unhappiness doesn't mean you've done something wrong, and it doesn't mean it's your job to make the boundary disappear. Learning how to experience disappointment, frustration and even anger—and come out the other side—is part of growing up.

When we set reasonable boundaries, we're teaching children how relationships work. We're teaching them that their needs matter, but so do the needs of the people around them. We're teaching them that their bodies deserve respect and so do ours. We're teaching them that disappointment isn't an emergency, frustration eventually passes and hearing “no” doesn't mean they are unloved.

Those lessons become even more important when children leave home and become part of a larger community. At school, one child's wants cannot always determine what happens next because there are other children whose needs matter, too. There are times when we have to wait, cooperate, clean up after ourselves, respect someone's space, accept an answer we don't particularly like or follow an adult's direction because safety requires it.

When children haven't had enough opportunities to practice those skills at home, someone else eventually has to teach them, and that can be much harder for the child than learning them first from the people they trust most. It also affects the community around them, because teachers must stop teaching to address behaviors and other children are sometimes left waiting while one child's needs take over the moment.

These aren't simply “school rules.” They are some of the first lessons children learn about living in a world with other people.
And eventually, all of those little lessons begin to come full circle. The child who learns to respect reasonable boundaries becomes the teenager who understands that other people have boundaries, too, and eventually the adult who can manage frustration, respect a partner, work with other people, take responsibility and set healthy boundaries of their own.

But here's the part I really want our parents to hear: if your family has gotten into a pattern where your child seems to be running the show and you don't know how to change it, please talk to us.

There is absolutely no judgment in asking for help. Sometimes these patterns develop so gradually that you don't even realize they're happening until you're hiding in the bathroom trying to get five minutes to yourself while someone is banging on the door. 😂 Sometimes parents know they need to set a boundary but have lost confidence in their ability to hold it when their child protests. And sometimes you're simply tired. You give in because you don't have the energy for another battle, and before long something you did once to get through a difficult afternoon has become the way your family operates.

We can help with that.

In fact, in many cases it is a much easier fix than parents imagine. Children are remarkably adaptable. When the adults in their lives decide what the reasonable boundaries are, communicate them clearly and then consistently follow through, children begin to adjust. They may not particularly appreciate the change at first—and the former CEO of the household may lodge a fairly vigorous complaint about the new management. 🤣—but they learn.

And something pretty wonderful can happen when they do. Children become more capable and independent because they're doing more for themselves. Parents become less exhausted because they're no longer trying to anticipate and satisfy every demand. And families can begin enjoying one another again instead of spending so much of their time negotiating who is actually in charge.

Setting boundaries doesn't mean loving your children less. It means loving them enough to teach them how to live with other people, while remembering that you are one of those people, too.

And if you need a little help getting there, just ask us. That's part of what we're here for.

🌱 Rooted at ONE

08/26/2026

I’ve finally finished planning our November field trip, and I have to admit that this one has become much more than a field trip for me. Of course, that’s probably what happens when an environmental educator, historian, Virginia Master Naturalist and Certified Interpretive Guide is given three days and told to plan an educational trip through eastern Virginia. 😂

We’re going to cover a lot of ground, but there really is a method to my madness. I didn’t choose these places simply because they’re wonderful places to take children, and I certainly didn’t sit down with a map and see how many attractions I could squeeze into three days. I wanted the entire weekend to tell a story about Virginia and the relationship between its people, its history and its natural landscape.

And in America’s 250th anniversary year, it seems particularly appropriate that our story will begin at Jamestown.

We have visited Jamestown before, but I’ve never believed that returning to an important place means repeating the same field trip. We return with different students, different questions and, sometimes, at a very different moment in our own history. This year happens to be one of those moments.

Before there was a United States of America, before there was a Declaration of Independence and long before anyone was celebrating an American birthday, there were already people living on and understanding this land. Then came the English settlement at Jamestown in 1607 and nearly 170 complicated years of change before the colonies declared independence.

So while we’ll certainly teach the Jamestown history our students should know, I want them to look beyond names and dates and begin looking at the landscape itself. Why here? What resources did this place provide? What challenges did it create? What did the Indigenous people who had lived here for generations already understand about this place that the English newcomers did not? And how did what happened here help shape the Virginia—and eventually the nation—that would follow?

From Jamestown, we’ll visit the Virginia Living Museum, which gives us an opportunity to continue that same story through Virginia’s native plants, animals, waterways and ecosystems. I’ve always believed that history makes much more sense when children understand the environment in which it happened. People don’t make decisions in a vacuum. Where they settle, what they eat, how they travel, what they build and even whether they survive are influenced by the land and water around them.

Before we leave the Jamestown area, however, I wanted our families to actually experience the James River, so we’re taking the Jamestown–Scotland Ferry across to Surry.

There is something very different about looking at a river on a map and actually crossing it. For much of Virginia’s history, our waterways weren’t obstacles between places; they were the highways that connected them. After spending the day looking at Jamestown from the land, we’ll be able to look back toward that landscape from the water and experience, even briefly, a perspective that mattered enormously to the people whose stories we’ve been studying.

Once we reach the other side, we’ll have dinner together on the water at Surry Seafood Company before heading back for the evening. I love that part of the plan almost as much as our educational stops because some of the best conversations with children happen when the “lesson” is supposedly over and everyone is sitting around a table talking about what they saw, what surprised them and what they’re still wondering about.

Saturday takes us farther into coastal Virginia, beginning at the Virginia Zoo and then continuing to Norfolk Botanical Garden, and I am particularly excited about our timing for the Garden this year.

This fall marks the grand opening of Norfolk Botanical Garden’s Garden of Tomorrow, the largest expansion in the Garden’s history and a project representing an investment of more than $50 million. By November, our students will have an opportunity to experience this remarkable project almost as soon as it has opened to the public.

For an environmental educator, that makes this much more than a beautiful garden to walk through.

The Garden of Tomorrow gives us an opportunity to look at what people are doing right now to rethink conservation, environmental education, biodiversity, water management and the role botanical gardens can play in protecting plants and ecosystems in a changing world. After beginning our trip by looking backward hundreds—and in some cases thousands—of years, suddenly we’ll be asking our students to turn around and look forward.

I think there is something particularly meaningful about taking children to a place called the Garden of Tomorrow. They are, after all, the people who will actually live in that tomorrow, and many of the environmental decisions being made today will ultimately belong to them.

Then comes Sunday and a place that is very close to my heart—the Great Dismal Swamp.

I want to make sure we give this place the time and respect it deserves because the Great Dismal Swamp is one of those rare places where Virginia’s natural history and human history are so intertwined that it is almost impossible to separate one from the other.

The swamp’s peat soils have been storing carbon for thousands of years, but generations of drainage and timbering changed the way water moved through this enormous wetland. When peat dries, it becomes vulnerable to fires that can burn underground and release carbon that had been stored there for centuries. Today, restoration work is underway to rewet portions of the swamp, reduce the risk of those devastating fires and allow the peatland to once again do something incredibly important for all of us—hold water and carbon in the ground.

That alone would make the Great Dismal Swamp an extraordinary place for an environmental educator to take children, particularly now, when understanding wetlands and their role in a changing climate has become so important.

But we cannot understand this swamp by studying its ecology alone.

People have lived in and around this landscape for thousands of years, beginning with Indigenous peoples who knew and used this environment long before Europeans arrived. Later, the swamp became a place of refuge for people escaping slavery, some of whom established maroon communities deep within it and lived beyond the reach of those who sought to enslave them.

I want our students to understand the remarkable contradiction in that history. The very things that caused generations of outsiders to describe this landscape as miserable, dangerous and something that needed to be drained, cleared and controlled were also the things that helped protect people who were seeking freedom. The water, dense vegetation, mud and sheer difficulty of moving through the swamp became a form of protection.

There is an important lesson in that, and not simply a history lesson. Sometimes understanding a place requires us to stop deciding what that place should be and begin asking what it already is, what it has provided, whom it has protected and what might be lost when we change it.

And then we’ll make our final stop at First Landing State Park.

I don’t want First Landing to feel like an afterthought at the end of an already very full weekend because, in many ways, it brings us right back to where our story began.

We will have started our journey at Jamestown, studying the place where the English established their permanent settlement in 1607. Before they ever reached Jamestown, however, those colonists first came ashore at Cape Henry and encountered the coastal Virginia landscape that we will be standing in more than 400 years later.

By Sunday afternoon, I hope our students will see that landscape very differently than they might have on Friday morning.

After three days of studying Virginia’s history alongside its rivers, wildlife, plants, wetlands and changing ecosystems, First Landing gives us one last opportunity to put all of those pieces together. Here we can move through maritime forest, wetlands and shoreline and look across the Chesapeake Bay while thinking about how profoundly water and geography have shaped the Virginia story.

And perhaps that is exactly the right place to finish.

We’ll have begun at Jamestown asking why people chose a particular place and what they understood—or failed to understand—about the environment around them. We’ll have crossed the James River ourselves, explored Virginia’s native plants and wildlife, considered what a Garden of Tomorrow might mean for the children who will inherit it, and stood within the Great Dismal Swamp learning what happens when human history and natural history become impossible to separate.

Then, at First Landing, we get to return to the beginning of the story with three days of new knowledge behind us.

That is really what I want this entire trip to accomplish. I don’t want our students to come home remembering a list of places they visited. I want them to come home beginning to understand how those places are connected and how Virginia itself has been shaped by the relationship between people and the land and water around them.

And that is also why we decided to open our field trips this year to homeschool families who would like to experience this kind of learning with us. You don’t have to be enrolled at ONE Forest School to join us. I know that traditional enrollment isn’t possible for every family, but I still want children in our community to have opportunities to experience what place-based education can look like when we take the classroom out into the places where history, science and the natural world actually meet.

This is place-based education as I understand it. History doesn’t happen separately from science. People don’t exist separately from their environment, and the landscape isn’t simply the backdrop where history happens. It is part of the story.

Sometimes the best way to understand Virginia is to get out there, stand in these places, ask good questions and give the landscape a chance to tell us what we’ve been missing.

Sometimes the very best classroom isn’t a classroom at all.

Sometimes it’s Virginia.

🌱 Rooted at ONE

08/24/2026

Tomorrow, we begin again.

For many of our children, tomorrow morning will feel wonderfully familiar. They know the trails, the trees, the teachers and the rhythm of a school day that rarely stays within four walls.

For others, tomorrow will be their very first day at ONE Forest School. This year, several of our new families have moved from other states specifically so their children could attend our school. That is something we don't take lightly. Entrusting someone with your child is a tremendous act of faith. Packing up your life and moving to give your child a different kind of education takes that faith to an entirely different level.

There won't be a traditional first-day group photograph this year. Several of our families have chosen not to have their children shared on social media, and we will always respect that choice.

But perhaps that's fitting, because what matters most about tomorrow probably wouldn't show up in a traditional group picture anyway.

Maybe the first-day picture was here all along.

It's in the backpacks hanging from their hooks and the boots waiting for another trip into the forest. It's in the first discoveries carried proudly back to a teacher, the questions we never saw coming, old friendships picking up where they left off and new ones just beginning.

And then there are the families who are still watching from the edge of the forest, wondering whether an education that looks this different could really be right for their child.

Tomorrow isn't a deadline.

ONE Forest School offers open enrollment throughout the school year because sometimes families need a little more time to find us, and sometimes they need a little more time to decide that different might be exactly what their child needs.

Tomorrow morning, some children will be coming home to the forest.

Others will be discovering it for the very first time.

And somewhere among those backpacks and muddy boots, a brand-new school year will begin.

Welcome to the 2026–2027 school year at ONE Forest School.

🌱 Rooted at ONE

08/22/2026

Two of our campers have had too much fun today at the Bedford County Fair! We’re here for two more hours so be sure to come by and say hello!!!

08/22/2026

We’re all set up and ready to go! Be sure to stop by and get your free gift!!!

08/16/2026

If you missed our Annual Open House, no worries! You can find us next Saturday at the Bedford County Fair at Liberty Lake Park from 10:00-3:00pm. We, along with 9 other fantastic local organizations, are participating in this year’s Community Expo!

Be sure to stop by and say hello!😎

08/15/2026