Fiddleheads Farm and Forest School

The Fiddleheads Story

Jessica Rhys is the founder, director and head teacher at Fiddleheads Farm and Forest School. Jessica has a background in environmental education, (Jessica has a degree in Environmental Education and Cross Cultural Studies from Prescott College in AZ. She has taught at the early childhood level in both public and private institutions. She long served as the Program Director at Cultivating Community in Portland, ME, a nonprofit dedicated to at risk youth development, urban gardening, and advocating for a sustainable local food system. She also served as the Interim Coordinator of the Maine School Garden Network.) As she got ready to enter the workforce again after the birth and care of her two sons, she decided to focus her educational efforts on early childhood while cultivating human connection to each other and to the earth on a deep, heart centered level. A longtime outdoor educator, Jessica gravitated immediately toward the forest school model, and has chosen to add into her unique ecological curriculum a strong focus on emotional intelligence and interpersonal relationships. There is perhaps no more profound age to cultivate an identity as a connected member of the earth community than in early childhood, that precious time when the heart is most open, the mind is most curious, and the world is full of wonder and joy. Out of this understanding, she created Fiddleheads Urban Forest Preschool in 2017 in Portland, Oregon. She ran that school until June of 2021, steering it through the very troubled times of the pandemic, and it survives and thrives now, fully enrolled and with a 50 family waitlist, being run by Arielle Slaughter, Jessica’s longtime co-teacher.

It was a hard decision to leave life in Oregon and the beautiful school community that was created there, but the desire to be near relatives and to live in a more rural environment led Jessica’s family to make the decision to move back to their native New England in 2020. She and her children spent the 2020-21 school year at The Riley School in Rockport, Maine and moved to Manchester, VT in June of 2021 . (Jessica grew up in the nearby town of Wells.) Jessica’s family fell in love with the Oliver Rice House, a restored 1768 home in Manchester Center built by some of her husband’s distant ancestors. Jessica is so happy to be back in her childhood landscape and running a forest school here. It feels like home to be surrounded by those familiar old mountains, and she is deeply joyful to be bringing alive the wonder of the landscape and its unique seasonal traditions for the children of this special and beautiful bioregion.

Read the below posts to learn more about our weekly activities.

Read about Gear, Safety and Enrollment

Read about the Fiddleheads Philosophy

Read about our Curriculum and Daily Schedule

Read about our Unique Location

Read about our Staff

Read about our Garden Workshops

Read about our Summer Program

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