Case Study - A field guide for taking the class outside

Overview

There is a teacher who knows their class would be calmer, more awake, more themselves after twenty minutes outside, and who never quite gets there, because planning it is one more thing on a list that is already too long. Rewyld for Schools is built for that teacher.

It is not a student app and it is not a Forest School replacement. It is a field guide. The curriculum is prompt-based, not step-by-step: each week is a single evocative question rather than a lesson plan. And the curriculum is the earth itself. Practices follow the real seasons and term time, so a lesson on bulbs and soil arrives in autumn and one on blossoms and seeds arrives in spring.

The free version is one screen with no login. A teacher anywhere visits a URL and sees this week's prompt, the senses it engages, and a play button. The premium school tool builds on that with a simplified four-step practice the teacher leads aloud (Arrive, Notice, Feel, Thank), plus location-aware seasonal notes that tell the teacher what is actually happening on the land outside their window, circle-time reflection prompts for back indoors, and a private teacher journal.

Rewyld for Schools is a Rewyld × Plantenvironment collaboration, built specifically for London primary classrooms and now in pilot with London primary schools. The seasonal curriculum is aligned to the National Curriculum across Reception to Year 6, it draws on a seven-week pilot run in late 2025, and it carries one conviction over from Rewyld: the forest is the teacher, and technology's job is to get the class out the door and then get out of the way. Sensory learning sits at the centre, nature is treated as kin rather than a resource, and there is nothing in it that asks a child to optimise themselves.

What we built