Sheri Grace has a PhD in early childhood education and spent years teaching teachers before she went looking for the thing her textbooks had left out. She found forest school, got a little mad nobody had told her about it sooner, and started Piedmont Forest School in a Winston-Salem park where, as she tells it, no one had ever actually played.

Five years on it runs five days a week, and this fall they are adding an Agile Learning Center to continue serving kids that grow up in their program. She walks through what a morning in the woods actually looks like, why a kid with a saw is steadier than you'd expect, and what four kids learned building a fort that nobody assigned.