About Forgotten Skillz
Forgotten Skillz is a Long Island-based experiential education program that explores nature, history, culture, traditional knowledge, craft, and human ingenuity through hands-on learning.
Our workshops invite participants to do more than hear about the past. They observe, investigate, experiment, build, make, discuss, and reflect. A piece of paper, a woven basket, a trail, a handmade tool, or an old method of communication can become an entry point into science, ecology, art, technology, history, and the human experience.
We bring these programs to schools, libraries, museums, parks, homeschool communities, youth organizations, and public audiences across Long Island.
Our Mission
Forgotten Skillz is built around three connected goals.
First, we learn about and help preserve ancient skills, cultures, and traditions. These practices represent generations of observation, creativity, adaptation, and accumulated knowledge.
Second, we explore the missed or abandoned branches of the human skill tree. We look at ideas, materials, and technologies that modern life has left behind and consider which lessons may still help us live more thoughtfully and sustainably today.
Third, we explore humanity across time, place, and culture. Different societies developed different answers to the same fundamental needs: food, shelter, communication, community, creativity, meaning, and belonging. Studying those answers helps us understand both the richness of human diversity and how much people have always shared.
What We Explore
Nature Literacy & Stewardship
Participants learn to notice and interpret the living world around them. Programs may explore local plants and wildlife, ecology, habitats, foraging traditions, environmental change, conservation, and the responsibilities that come with spending time outdoors.
Traditional Crafts & Materials
Our workshops examine how people transformed natural and everyday materials into useful and meaningful objects. Participants may make paper, ink, baskets, cordage, carvings, books, tools, earthen structures, and other forms of material culture.
History, Culture, & Human Innovation
We explore the technologies, stories, symbols, games, foodways, communication systems, and practical decisions that shaped human life across cultures and historical periods.
Outdoor Skills & Practical Applications
Navigation, fire, shelter, preparedness, and related outdoor skills remain part of our work. They are taught within a broader framework of judgment, responsibility, environmental awareness, historical context, and ethical stewardship.
How We Teach
Forgotten Skillz programs are immersive, multi-sensory, and experiential. Participants are active investigators rather than passive observers.
A workshop might begin with a historical question, a natural material, an unfamiliar tool, or a problem people once needed to solve. Participants then learn through direct experience, testing ideas and developing their own understanding of why a technique worked, how it evolved, and what it can still teach us.
Our programs frequently cross traditional subject boundaries. A single activity may include science, visual art, social studies, literacy, engineering, environmental education, and social-emotional learning.
Why These Skills Matter
Traditional knowledge is valuable for more than nostalgia. It reveals how people responded to limited resources, changing environments, community needs, and unfamiliar challenges.
Hands-on work develops patience, curiosity, creativity, observation, coordination, judgment, collaboration, and respect for materials. It can also help participants see themselves as part of a much longer human story—one in which people have always learned, adapted, created, and shared knowledge.
Join the Exploration
Forgotten Skillz offers public events as well as programs created for schools, libraries, museums, parks, homeschool groups, and community organizations.
Forgotten Skillz is a service of Synchronicity Coaching Inc