Nursery World - EYFS Activities: Five ways to… mark-make outside

How to combine mark-making activity with the outdoors environment. By Julie Mountain

Use your outdoor spaces to develop a love of mark-making, encouraging children to scavenge for markers and use every kind of surface as a canvas.

1 EVERY SURFACE

As children develop their co-ordination, they need lots of space for mark-making. Use every surface outdoors to encourage them to create – pebbles on grass, sticks in the sandpit, chalk on the Tarmac, water on the walls, string through the fences, paint on rolls of wallpaper, bark chips in the Mud Lab.

Creating large-scale, semi-permanent marks like this can be collaborative (unlike a sheet of A4) and involves the big muscle groups, building children’s command of their bodies and creating huge artworks into the bargain.

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