***Update: Thanks to your generous donations and a significant gift from an anonymous donor, Forest Days will go ahead at the Sarah Roberts for Fall 2025! Thank you, Sarah Roberts families.

If you would like to support our fundraising efforts for the Spring 2026 season, please go to the Friends of the Sarah Roberts fundraising page here.***

The Sarah Roberts plans to continue and expand its partnership with the Boston Outdoor Preschool Network (BOPN) into school year 2025-26. This is an incredible offering to students, providing experience in nature to improve academic learning, personal development, and environmental stewardship.

In school year 2024-25, over the course of 10 weeks in the fall and 10 weeks in the spring, BOPN staff partnered with all Sumner K0/K1 classrooms in weekly morning nature adventures to the Arnold Arboretum. Children brought curiosity, energy, and joy each week as we watched leaf buds swell, learned to tap sugar-maple trunks, took “micro-hikes” to uncover hiding insects, and discover how vital rain and mud are to nature. We compared the growth of trees and butterflies to our own changing bodies and celebrated nature’s lively bursts of color. To celebrate further, Sumner teachers and parents of K2 classrooms began their own Forest Days this spring!

Help Us Keep Forest Days Going!

We want to continue this partnership year after year for our intrepid adventurers and explore expanding this program into rising grades. Our past years of collaboration were generously funded by the Cabot Family Charitable Trust, but now we need your support to keep this program going into school year 2025-26. We need gear and supplies for our adventurers and staff days covered to enable each of the K0/K1 classrooms to participate.

If you’d like to help support this initiative for next year and beyond, please contribute! Any contribution will greatly assist our ability to partner with the Sarah Roberts next year. Any questions or interest to volunteer, please contact BOPN educator Marie O’Reilly at marie.oreilly@bopn.org.

Forest Days at the Sarah Roberts

By Boston Outdoor Preschool Network

Forest Days at the Sarah Roberts

Playful learning adventures in nature

Team Members