Przedszkola leśne a potrzeba edukacji zdrowotnej i ekologicznej wśród najmłodszych

The degradation of the environment, and also the trend in contemporary lifestyle adverse from the point of view of society and connected with restricting physical activity, result in new requirements faced by the organisers of pre-school education. These requirements are relevant, first and foremost, to the development of environmental and health awareness amongst the young generation. Traditional nursery schools take under consideration the above-mentioned issues while drawing up and implementing their curricula, nevertheless, those curricula fail to solve the problems of health, such as, for instance, posture defects, vision defects, a low level of the development of communication competences, and the feeling of alienation. In the light of the outlined needs, the conception of forest nursery schools, which is dynamically developing in the countries of Western Europe, but not only there, is a proposal worth considering. This conception has reached Poland as well. In this article, the outline of the history, the philosophical-­didactic foundations of forest nursery schools, together with the development of them all over the world and in Poland, are presented.