Nursery World - Enabling Environments: Risk

'Because it's exciting': childen enjoy - and need - the experience
of danger Forest School can offer. But educators need a deeper
understanding to handle it effectively, Martin Pace explains.

Play, and in particular physical play, is a way for children to test limits and refine skills. As they walk, run, climb and hang, children strengthen the large muscle groups in their bodies and learn how to move through space. Research shows that such gross motor activities are ideally learnt in nature where there are steep slopes, rough cliffs, and trees.

A natural environment affords more intense and varied physical activity than most nursery play areas, and it is especially in natural environments that children will readily engage in risky play. It is with these ideas in mind that at Reflections Nursery in Worthing, West Sussex, we take children into local woodland for Forest School sessions each week.

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