 The schoolcraft learning community is taking your average class and putting it outdoors among nature. Reporter Cheryl Moore tells us about their forest classroom for this week's Golden Apple. When was the last time you spent time amongst the trees? While in the schoolcraft learning community, kids are getting quality time with nature at least once a week, thanks to the forest classroom. The forest classroom is a place where we can come out and explore nature and we're not just sitting in a brick and mortar school learning about nature in a textbook. A lot of these programs started in Germany and they have forest kindergartens over there and there's a lot of research going on now in Japan as well about the benefits of just being in nature on our mental health and our immune systems. I learned about everything in nature. The students start with explore time, where they can climb trees, find critters and use their imagination to explore a place. Played a lot and we built a fort and my favorite thing was playing tag. When the class is sitting around the campfire at home base, they're learning a multitude of survival skills like how to build a fire and pitch a tent. They also get science lessons. We come back and we do a lot of cooking for our snacks. Every kid's involved and we try to do a lot of learning about forestry on topics as well like tree ID, track ID. We do a lot of work with you know just the natural sciences. Today we were learning about leaves and we found three colored leaves. In sunshine rain or even snow, it doesn't matter the forest classroom is always happening and another cool thing is that every kid in the school gets to experience it. Every grade will do that once a week. The younger kids get a little bit longer time in the morning and then middle school gets a little shorter time in the afternoon because we can just get to work and focus on doing a little more science work. One part of the forest classroom is encouraging the students to spend more time outside and so far it seems to be working. Whenever I see them in the hallway they ask me when is our day for the forest? So I think they really look forward to it. It's a great highlight to kind of break up the week. Reporting in Bemidji with this week's Golden Apple, Shawmore, Lakeland News.