Our mission has always been to help kids and families learn together through well-designed, outdoor play experiences. Since the first Tinkergarten class over a decade ago, we’ve remained flexible about how to accomplish that mission, delivering our unique way of learning in a range of places, via a diverse set of teachers, and in various formats. That allowed us to impact hundreds of thousands of families in our first decade across all 50 states, each year, in all four seasons.
There is more need than ever to help kids learn outside and ensure families build in time together outdoors into their lives. And yet, there are more challenges than ever for organizations like ours to sustain financially and continue to provide families with the highest quality experience. Towards the end of 2022, it became clear that we could not continue to operate as we had been and remain sustainable. We also realized that the way we were structured was too rigid and costly to enable us to reach the number of kids, teachers and communities who really need our kind of learning.
We believe that we have much work yet to do, so we made important decisions about how to adapt in order to continue to help every child and family we can into the decades to come.
What has not changed?
Our curriculum, training, community and support are still the same. We continue to design, refine and produce our play-based series of lessons and training. Our curriculum and training still supports kids ages 1.5 to 8 in developing eight essential skills and falling head over heels for the natural world.
There are still two ways for families to learn at Tinkergarten:
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Follow our curriculum at your own pace with Tinkergarten Anywhere—our on-demand format.
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Learn with a local TG Teacher who is offering classes featuring the same Tinkergarten program.
No matter which format families choose, we all follow one set of lessons each season. This Spring, for example, those lessons are designed to help kids strengthen our human superpower—Empathy. This Summer? We'll be boosting kids communication skills with our "Camp Tinkergarten" themed lessons!
What has changed?
In order to be around for decades to come, how we work with teachers and how we and teachers handle registration in live classes has shifted.
Instead of offering classes through tinkergarten.com, teachers offer Tinkergarten lessons directly to kids and families in their communities or their classrooms. Teachers now have the flexibility to teach Tinkergarten to children and caregivers in local green spaces or to children in group learning settings, including preschools, k-2 classrooms, forest schools, homeschool co-ops, pods, daycares, libraries, community centers, faith-based centers, and more.
Teachers can subscribe to Tinkergarten for Teachers to get the curriculum, training, community and support they need to teach Tinkergarten in the way that works for them and the kids and families they serve.
As a family, you can now search our "Find a Local Teacher" directory to find teachers who are offering Tinkergarten in your area. From there, you'll be able to click off to the sites on which our teachers have posted their offerings. There, you'll be able to view and sign up for programs, either with the teacher themselves or through whatever school or organization they're offering Tinkergarten, and registration is no longer processed directly on Tinkergarten.
Tinkergarten has also become part of the Highlights for Children family of companies. This marvelous match will also allow us to reach more teachers, kids and families and continue to ensure that our work is sustainable for many moons to come. Read more here.
How is it going?
We launched the updated platform in early April, and hundreds of our TG Teachers have already signed up, with more joining on every day. We want to thank our returning TG families—for adapting along with us during this change and especially for supporting your TG Teachers. We CHEER to our TG Teachers who are bravely problem solving and supporting one another through this transition. It is such an honor to support them, learn with them and see them prove out new ways to bring Tinkergarten classes and experiences to kids and families. Our TG Teachers are so committed to continue to teach Tinkergarten, and we are humbled by their dedication, persistence and creativity. This is an incredibly special group of educators, and they are already inspiring more educators to come and join us in this wonderful work.
If you have any questions, please let us know at support@tinkergarten.com. We love to learn with you and are so honored to support you and all kids, families and teachers!
