A number of core organisational issues make all the difference to how well outdoor provision works for everyone. Paying attention to these ‘12 Keys to Unlocking Learning Outdoors’ and working on them as a team will gradually unlock the wonderful potential of the outdoors. This article explores how to choose the ‘right stuff’ for children to work with outside.
KEY 6: MATERIALS AND RESOURCES FOR PLAY, AND HOW CHILDREN ARE ENCOURAGED TO USE THEM
Materials and resources:
- make best use of the outdoors (especially nature and whole-body activity)
- enable many types of play
- respond to children’s interests (such as schema)
- are mostly open-ended, versatile and abundant
- are used safely and effectively.
WHY IS THIS ISSUE KEY TO UNLOCKING THE OUTDOORS?
Harnessing what the outdoors is capable of doing for young children’s wellbeing, learning and development through providing a wide range of holistic discovery and play opportunities requires careful thinking about the nature, range and quantity of materials, equipment, tools and other resources provided.
Outdoor spaces can often be cluttered with items of low play value that actually make the environment less pleasant to be in. As a first step, we need to review what resources we have and how well they are working.
Things that work well indoors are frequently much less effective outside and fail to open up its huge potential. Reducing clutter and resources that have low play value will make room for abundant supplies of the best and most popular things that do capture and harness outdoors’ true potential.
The most effective materials and resources help to draw on the special nature of the outdoors, give children everyday contact with the natural world and encourage use of the whole body by being large, heavy and an effort to manipulate. This empowers every child to discover and make sense of their world, themselves and each other, and to explore what they can make happen or imagine.
In a rich and meaningful ‘menu’ of continuous provision outdoors, individual children will be able to draw upon what is personally relevant to them, noticing and interacting with particular elements of this enabling environment. Extensive considerations and suggestions for effective, relevant resourcing can be found in each of the chapters in my book Playing and Learning Outdoors.
WHAT DO WE NEED TO BE WORKING ON IN PRACTICE?
The full range of a setting’s outdoor resources must support the main aspects of outdoor provision, as described in the seven ‘super ingredients’ in Playing and Learning Outdoors. They will enable involvement in many types of play, from quiet, calm and individual to large-scale, energetic and highly interactive. In the outdoors, children should experience a wide range of real materials and many tools to work with them. Because the wide range of scales in the world of outdoors (from the miniscule to the massive) greatly extends the range available indoors, materials and resources should provide experiences from tiny to huge.
The most interesting and valuable equipment and materials stimulate and support children to follow their own enquiries, fascinations and drives for play (for example, digging, hiding, moving themselves and things, causing things to happen) and enable children to be deeply involved for long periods of time. In particular, materials and tools must respond to what children are driven to find out about and do outdoors:
- What is in the world and how does it work?
- What am I and how do I fit in to this world?
- What does it do to me and what can I do to it?
Materials and resources with high ‘play value’ outdoors are non-prescribed, open-ended and versatile so they spark curiosity, stimulate innovative use and can be used in many ways, including for representing something else (which is early symbolic thinking). They should provide extensive access to both the real natural and physical world and the real world of humans – plastic facsimiles have very little to offer about how things truly are.
The best resources for outdoor play stimulate children to engage all their senses, especially the inner senses of motion and body awareness, in a very physical and active way through being big, heavy and awkward. Big and difficult equipment also encourages interaction, communication, collaboration and negotiation.
Importantly, children should be encouraged to use the materials innovatively and to explore their own enquiries. It is critical that they know how to use resources safely and effectively so they can use them in a variety of creative ways.
HOW TO START DEVELOPING PROVISION AND PRACTICE
- Things to consider, discuss and evaluate
- Do your resources respond to your children’s interests and do they have high play value?
- Can children use the outdoor resources in lots of different ways and are these resources making the best use of being outdoors?
- Do children know how to use them effectively and safely, and are there plenty of the ones children most like to use?
Things to explore and read
- Playing and Learning Outdoors: The practical guide and sourcebook for excellence in outdoor provision and practice with young children by Jan White (3rd edn., 2020. Routledge).
- Outdoor Learning in the Early Years: Management and innovation by Helen Bilton (3rd edn., 2010. Routledge).
- This Place is like a Building Site! – video by Learning through Landscapes: https://bit.ly/3yaMhhN.
- Loose Parts Play: A toolkit – free PDF by Theresa Casey and Juliet Robertson (2nd edn., 2019. Edinburgh: Inspiring Scotland) – https://bit.ly/3OPKJj9.
Things to do
- Use Marjorie Ouvry’s ‘checklist for outdoor resources’ (pages 86-87, Exercising Muscles and Minds, 2020. Jessica Kingsley Publishers) to review how well your resources are facilitating all elements and aspects of outdoor provision.
- As a team, observe and evaluate how well your materials and resources:
- a) make best use of the outdoors across the year
- b) encourage whole-bodied physical activity and interaction with others
- c) enable, support and sustain children’s questions, interests and drives
- d) stimulate imaginative and innovative use.
- Decide what features you want from your resources and keep only those that fit your criteria. Such as: popular with the children; open-ended and versatile; high play value; robust and safe to use; nature-based; contrast with and extend indoor experience; and so on.
Finding the ‘right stuff’ for a Tarmac playground
‘Ensuring that our children have lots of time to play outdoors has always been high on my priority list,’ says Emma Sefton, foundation lead at St Catherine’s Catholic Primary School in Sheffield. ‘To make this happen, we had to work as a team to ensure that the space and resources were right for all of our children, from three to five years old. Many years ago, we had lots of plastic and “safe” items such as small-world tuff trays and games on blankets. As our space is on Tarmac, we were cautious.
‘After researching and attending some courses around loose parts, we started to think differently. We gradually exchanged the “one use wonders” such as plastic sand and water toys for real, heavy, large and interesting objects in all areas. Our resources now include: real pots and pans, long-handled sweeping brushes and rakes, tubes, crates, buckets, suitcases, large buckets and a real working tap for children to transport water from one place to another.
‘We used lots of palettes to create dividers and spaces, using some of these for storage. We quickly learned that the children didn’t need “actual” sand and water toys, or games and small-world areas set up for them; they needed time, space and interesting resources to enhance the outdoor space. When introducing loose parts and encouraging challenging play, we established two outdoor rules: be safe and have fun.
‘Observing the children using loose parts, I noticed that they had to think more creatively. The children were having to problem-solve, think, take risks and communicate with others to achieve what they set out to do.’
Professor Jan White is author of several books on outdoor provision and practice and co-director of the specialist training company Outdoors Thinking
