The road to Bjørkelia naturbarnehage runs north from Trondheim along the eastern bank of the Nidelva, past a dairy farm and a small football pitch and a stretch of birch wood that gives the kindergarten its name.
It was minus eleven Celsius on the morning in late April 2026 when Saira Rao arrived. The snow had crusted overnight. A small group of four-year-olds was already in the woods, scraping at the crust with their boots to find the moss underneath.
Bjørkelia has been operating since 1998. It is one of about three hundred forest kindergartens, or naturbarnehager, across Norway. The director, Ingrid Aune, is fifty-one. She has worked at the kindergarten for nineteen years.
There are twenty-two children enrolled, between three and six years old. There is one small heated building, about the size of a two-car garage, which they use for lunch and for changing out of wet snowsuits. Everything else happens outside.
On the morning Saira visited, the children were divided into three groups, each with one adult. Two groups were in the woods. The third was at a small frozen pond, where a teacher named Kjetil was helping them check a wire trap they had set the day before for water beetles.
The trap was empty. The children had expected this. They had set it knowing the pond was frozen and the beetles were not active. They wanted to check it anyway, because checking the trap was now the morning's first ritual.
Kjetil is sixty-two and has been at Bjørkelia for twelve years. Before that he was a primary-school teacher in Stjørdal. He told Saira that he had taken the job because he was tired of being inside.
The children are not tired of being inside, he said. They are too young to know what tired of inside is. But I was tired of it.
The day at Bjørkelia begins at 7:30 a.m. and ends at 4:30 p.m. The children are outside, weather permitting, for most of it. Weather permits more than visitors expect. The school closes outdoor play only at minus twenty Celsius or in active lightning.
On cold days the children move constantly. The adults rotate them through activities — short games, longer building projects, then a hot meal at noon — to keep core temperatures up.
Ingrid showed Saira the kindergarten's gear closet. It is more than half the heated building. Snowsuits, mittens, hats, balaclavas, wool socks, boot liners, extra everything. Each child has three full sets. Parents wash and return one set a day.
The municipality subsidizes the gear. Ingrid said this was not unusual.
The pedagogical theory at Bjørkelia, to the extent it is articulated, is small. The children are outside. They make things. Adults stay nearby, mostly quiet, and intervene when intervention is necessary. The rest is left alone.
Saira watched a five-year-old named Tobias spend forty minutes trying to balance a stick across two rocks. He failed, repositioned the rocks, failed, tried a different stick, failed again. No adult offered help. He eventually succeeded, looked around to confirm he had done it, and walked away.
Outcomes are difficult to measure. The Norwegian education ministry has tracked forest-kindergarten cohorts against indoor-kindergarten cohorts for two decades. The differences in standardized cognitive testing at age eight are small. The differences in self-reported well-being and gross motor coordination are larger.
The Norwegian researchers who follow this work tend not to overclaim. A 2024 review out of NTNU in Trondheim concluded that outdoor childcare produces moderate benefits in physical health and in some measures of executive function, and that the effect on later academic achievement is weak.
What is harder to capture in the data is the quality of a day spent the way the children at Bjørkelia spend it.
By the time Saira left at 2 p.m., the wind had risen and the temperature had dropped to minus fourteen. Two of the youngest children had been brought inside to warm up. The rest were still in the woods. Tobias was now trying to lash three sticks together with a piece of yarn he had found.
Ingrid walked Saira to her car. She said that the kindergarten has a six-year waiting list. She said it without any particular pride.
It is a kindergarten, she said. The children would also be fine if they went somewhere else.
Saira drove back to Trondheim through the birch wood. The sun was already low, the kind of low it gets at sixty-three degrees north in April.
On the dashboard her thermometer read minus fifteen. She thought of Tobias and his three sticks and his yarn, and she thought it was probably true, what Ingrid had said, that the children would be fine if they went somewhere else. But she also thought it was probably true that they would not, in any other place, have had quite this kind of morning.
