After leaping over the brook, the three girls led me to the uprooted end of the fallen pine tree, where a geocache container—a rare sign of civilization in this section of the woods—had been stored below it. Afterward, we hiked up a hill, keeping the brook as our line, until we reached a (relatively) flat area where small pools had formed. I imagined that these three children could have stayed there for at least an hour, constructing and deconstructing dams, but they were eager to show me the next stop on the tour: a large ditch.

Their teacher, who was following me, led the children in counting as they all jumped into the hole in the ground. “One, two, three, four!” they counted in Finnish. (For good measure, I jumped into the ditch, too.) The teacher, Pelo, explained that this experience represented how she and the two aides aspire to teach the kindergartners in the woods. She described this approach as “secret” learning, when children are unaware that they’re learning academic content. In the forest, these Finnish educators might lead the children to find sticks of varying lengths and organize them from shortest to longest, form letters out of natural materials, or count mushrooms.

This publically funded forest kindergarten launched several weeks ago, so regular routines are still being developed, but I was curious to hear about its daily schedule. Pelo told me that it largely depends on the day, because they provide the children with a lot of leeway to pursue their own interests, which means that they hold their own teaching plans loosely. Typically, the children have two hours of daily free play in the woods. They set aside time for lunch. Even though the children lack access to toys and electronics, they’ve never reported that they’re bored in the forest, according to Pelo. “But when the winter comes,” she said, “we’ll see.” (Like other forest kindergartens in Europe, this group plans to meet outside rain or shine, even when the temperature plummets.)

Throughout my visit, I kept searching for the “bored student,” and after one hour, I thought I finally found him. Reclining against the base of a tree, I spotted a tall blonde boy with a glazed look in his eyes. He simply stared at the brook, listening to its constant gurgling. Then after a few minutes, he pulled himself up and crossed to the other side of the water. The boy wasn’t bored, I corrected myself. He was simply resting.

One of the most predictable parts of this kindergarten’s day is the morning ritual they perform, after hiking about a hundred yards from Western Puijo Preschool in the city of Kuopio. Once the children lay their matching, crimson-colored backpacks around the trunk of a pine tree, the class forms a circle and students greet each other by chanting, syllable by syllable, each person’s name—“Ju-ho! Lau-ri! I-lo-na!” Then Pelo reviews the days of the week with a fun song (there’s a different movement for each day), and asks the children to determine the correct date. It was a routine I’d expect to find, in some form or other, in typical kindergarten classrooms in Finland and the United States. But witnessing that morning ritual, in the context of the forest, got me to wonder: Is there something about being outside that’s especially beneficial for kids?