Step outside with Julie Mountain of Learning Through Landscapes for an appreciation of why outdoor experiences are so important for young children's development
Welcome to the first in a series of articles promoting the value of the outdoors and outdoor play at your setting. We will be demonstrating imaginative ideas to spur you on to achieve change in your own setting, no matter how small or awkward your outdoor space might be. There will be practical ideas for activities and games, as well as background information on how the children in your setting will benefit from having regular access to the outdoors.
There is a great deal that settings can do with little or no money and without digging up all of the tarmac or grass. What settings do need is a commitment to getting very young children out and about, plus support from colleagues and parents to enable the setting to become a place where learning takes place seamlessly indoors and outdoors, and where children are able to make their own choices about where they'd like to play.
It is very exciting that the Foundation Stage curriculum gives official recognition to the importance of providing young children with rich and varied experiences of the outdoor environment, so giving practitioners explicit permission to go outdoors with the children and create learning opportunities through play.
Natural benefits
But what is so special about taking children outdoors? When we think back to our own childhoods, a lot of the most memorable experiences that spring to mind revolve around our fascination with the natural world - splashing in puddles, scrunching through leaves, watching spiders spin a web and feeling the sunshine on our faces. The outdoors remains at the top of young children's lists of favourite places, and it is the everyday observation of early years practitioners that many children 'would stay out all day if they could'.
The outdoors helps children to gain self-confidence, build friendships, stimulate curiosity, develop communication, acquire a strong sense of place and explore and enjoy what their bodies can do.
It is crucial that we protect children's right to be given access to a rich range of outdoor experiences when we reflect on the kind of world that they are growing up in. Many young children, regardless of where they live, spend a great deal of their time indoors and on activities that essentially isolate them from their outdoor environment. They spend hours watching television, they travel to and from many places by car and the bulk of their activities tend to be oriented more towards indoors than outdoors.
We could be in danger of creating a generation of 'insiders' rather than 'outsiders'. This is already having a major effect on the health and well-being of young children. Statistics show that an increasing number of under-fives are overweight or obese due to lack of exercise and poor diet. The fear of letting children play freely outdoors and the growing popularity of indoor entertainments has meant that many children today are at risk of not fully developing the positive attitudes and feelings towards their outdoor environment which they will need in later life.
Need for space
We face a group of children whose freedom is diminishing and whose sense of security is gradually being eroded, which means that the outdoor environments offered by their early years settings and schools often represent the very last bastion of outdoor freedom and provide children's only regular experience of being outdoors.
Young children need to have their senses stimulated and their physical abilities tested and developed. They need interesting surfaces and textures to run on, places to crawl through, things to pull themselves up on and places where they can climb. They need to encounter a wide range of sounds, sights and smells. They need to be able to hide and be secret as well as to know what it feels like to go over, under, on top of, inside and through things.
We need to let young children run, jump, skip, dance and enjoy what their bodies can do. Their rapid physical, social and cognitive development demands an outdoor space that offers a rich and ever-changing range of opportunities. Imaginative play is a fundamental element of that development and so the outdoor space must also support such play with props, activities and equipment which excite and stimulats them. They need spaces where messes don't matter and where creativity flourishes and the child is at the centre of everything which is happening. As the Foundation Stage tells us, practitioners must ensure that the emphasis is on learning and teaching, in that order, and that the children lead the way.
A well-equipped place
At Mill Hill Nursery in Sunderland (described by Ofsted as 'an excellent school'), staff and parents have worked hard to improve the quality of their outdoor space, installing new features and increasing the variety of experiences available to the children. Headteacher Gloria Simpson has been very successful in raising funds for the garden, winning a school grounds award from London Electricity in Sunderland in 2002. The nursery was subsequently chosen to be a pilot setting in the national School Grounds of the Future programme funded by the Department for Education and Skills, the only nursery to be chosen.
However, Mill Hill's success has not been entirely down to funding. The nursery had a clear vision of what it wanted to achieve for its children and it has been careful to make changes in easily manageable stages, evaluating success regularly and planning ahead. Staff have worked with children to establish what was needed outdoors and have involved the community in raising funds and helping with practical work. The nursery also made 'creative' use of neighbours such as Morrison's supermarket.
It was decided that the first focus for improvement would be children's gross motor skills, so a canopy was erected outside the entrance to the nursery to allow children to play on equipment in all weathers - and there certainly is plenty of weather in the north-east. Larger items of fixed equipment, such as balance beams, enable children to challenge themselves, and their need to express themselves through large gestures and loud noises is fulfilled by the decked 'stage' area. This is a particularly popular part of the garden. The contrast between this communal, open space and the intimate den right beside it, hidden in the middle of a tall conifer tree, offers children meaningful play choices.
A nature area in another part of the garden addresses the need for a place to develop children's fine motor skills, as well as their confidence in communication. Children care for their pond and take a great interest in the life in and around it. There is a vegetable plot, and children enjoy digging for worms in the dirt patch, left over especially for this purpose.
The nursery is now busy creating a 'waterworks' feature in a previously unused part of the nursery. There will be gullies and wheels, channels and dams, waterfalls and pools. Staff recognise the value of water play and have decided that it makes far more sense to give children this experience outdoors where the mess doesn't matter and the scale can be so much more ambitious.
Later in this series of articles we'll print some photographs of the finished article and talk about other settings that have used water in creative ways outdoors.
