Want children learning in, with and from the natural world, every day of the year?

Nature Pedagogy gives early years educators a framework for planning, documenting and assessing learning outdoors, in any setting and in any weather.

Start with the book

Developed by Dr Claire Warden through her doctoral research, The Creation and Theorisation of Nature Pedagogy, and practised every day at Auchlone Nature Kindergarten in Perthshire. It now shapes practice in more than 30 countries.

Nature Pedagogy helps you:

    • Plan learning that moves between the room, the garden and the land beyond the gate
    • Turn a puddle, a fallen branch or a change in the wind into a line of inquiry
    • Document what happens outdoors in a Floorbook® you would hand an inspector without checking it first
    • Assess risk with confidence, so tools, trees and weather stop being the reason to stay in
    • Link what children do outside to your curriculum framework
    • Give children a sense of belonging to the place they actually live in

What if outdoor learning survived the winter, the inspection and the wettest fortnight of the year?

Explore Nature Pedagogy training →

What is Nature Pedagogy?

Most settings already value time outside. There is a garden, a weekly forest session, a slot in the day when children go out and come back in again.

Nature Pedagogy runs through the whole of practice instead. It treats the natural world as a teacher, and the adult as someone who notices what a child is exploring in a stick, a stone or a puddle and helps that thinking grow.

Children learn about, in, with, for and from nature. What they notice becomes the inquiry. The inquiry is documented in a Floorbook®, and the Floorbook® is what you plan from next.

Over time children build a kinship with the living world. That sense of belonging is what motivates them to challenge themselves in everything else.

Inside, Outside, Beyond

At the centre of Nature Pedagogy sits a planning framework Claire developed to keep a child's thinking continuous across the day.

A child's curiosity might begin indoors, extend into the garden and deepen in the woods. Planning across all three keeps that journey whole rather than breaking it into separate sessions in separate places.

  • Inside

    Inside is the room, and the child's own internal world of thoughts, feelings and identity.

  • Outside

    Outside is the garden or the playground, and the social and sensory life of relationships, weather and community.

  • Beyond

    Beyond is the wilder world past the gate, and the awe, wonder and imagination that come with it.

Take the next step

  • Learning with Nature

    Learning with Nature: Embedding Outdoor Practice

    Claire's foundational text on bringing the natural world into everyday planning. Frameworks for seasonal and project planning, guidance on risk and benefit, and the self-audit that shows you where your setting sits today.

    Buy the book 

  • Introduction to Nature Pedagogy

    A self-paced hour covering the four elements, the four features of Nature Pedagogy, loose parts and play affordance. Enough to take back to your setting on Monday, indoors, outdoors or beyond. CPD accredited, with a month's access.

    Join the course 

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Meet Dr Claire Warden

The creator of Nature Pedagogy

Claire has spent 35 years working with children outdoors, first as a teacher, then through the research that became her doctoral thesis on Nature Pedagogy.

Auchlone, her nature kindergarten in Perthshire, is where the approach is tested. Everything she teaches has been used with real children, in real weather, before it reaches a book or a course.

She founded the International Association of Nature Pedagogy, and her books Learning with Nature, Nurture Through Nature and The Potential of a Puddle are used by educators around the world.

Work With Claire

Ready to let nature lead?

Choose the way in that suits where you are now.

Order the bookStart the Pathway