Effects of Forests School Practices on Preschool Children

The aim of this study is to evaluate the effects of forest school practices, one of the alternative learning approaches in preschool education, on preschool children. Today, alternative education approaches that are learner-centered and skill-based, stimulate children’s natural curiosity, emphasize first-hand experiences, deal with how the child learns rather than what he/she learns, and considers creativity, prediction and analysis skills. Accordingly, it is of great importance to determine and evaluate the benefits of these educational approaches to education. In the study was used phenomenology design, one of the qualitative research methods. The sample of this study consists of five children, five families and five teachers working in the institution. As data collection tools for the study were used semi-structured interview forms for families and teachers and “Forest Impressions” observation form for children. The analysis of the interview questions in the research were transformed into codes and themes separately by two data coders. In addition, the codes and themes transformed by different data encoders were compared by two data encoders. The consistency value was calculated with the Cohen Kappa coefficient in the codes collected under the theme title of each theme. The codes and themes obtained from the research data were modeled using the N-Vivo qualitative data analysis program. According to the findings, it shows that the forest school approach has positive effects on preschool children.