ONE Forest School

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

08/15/2026

If this sounds like a good fit for you, give us a call to schedule an interview! 540.682.6320.

08/12/2026

Ren and I watched The Bird Boy the other night and wow…what an incredibly beautiful little movie. I thought we were sitting down to watch a story about a boy and a bird, but somewhere along the way it became something much bigger.

This little boy has lost almost everything, and the bird becomes his anchor. For a while, you find yourself hoping right along with him that somehow this bird is going to make everything okay again, until he finally realizes that it can’t. It can’t change what happened or give him back what he has lost. And strangely enough, it’s only after he understands that the bird can’t fix anything that it somehow begins to fix everything.

There is another message woven throughout the story that really stayed with me: the most important part of your story is WHEN you were born. The second is WHY you were born.

I think that’s when I realized why this movie felt so familiar to me and why I kept thinking about Forest School while we watched it. We spend so much time talking about what children learn from nature, but sometimes I think we have it backwards. Sometimes nature gives a child a connection to something outside of themselves that eventually helps them understand something inside themselves.

It might be a bird, a tree, a creek, a frog they’ve checked on every morning for three weeks, or some little corner of the forest that belongs to them in a way the rest of us may never completely understand. We don’t get to decide which connection will matter or what it will eventually mean to them.

Maybe our job is simply to give children enough time, freedom and space to discover those connections for themselves.

Tonight, curled up watching a movie with my six-year-old granddaughter, I was reminded all over again why that matters so much. ❤️

🌱 Rooted at ONE

Orphaned August finds an unexpected friend in a tiny ostrich named Koobus. But when Koobus is taken away, August sets out to rescue him—learning that love an...

08/11/2026

We’re quickly moving into our Fall Fundraising Season! Please consider supporting our students this school year!