Outdoor Play for 1--3 Year Olds

How to set up and run your own outdoor toddler group

Isabel Hopwood-Stephens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317676904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica per la prima infanzia

We are all mindful of the increasing news coverage of outdoor play and its benefits, but how can you go beyond the sandpit and hopscotch to create a magical and creative experience for the children in your care?

This book provides all the encouragement you will need to set up and run an outdoor toddler group. It provides a step-by-step guide to selecting an appropriate site, resourcing the outside area, devising age-appropriate activities, planning activities and the legal requirements involved. Including an overview of the developmental milestones of babies and toddlers, it shows you how you can meet their specific needs.

Features include:

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• An activity bank full of games, suggestions for crafts, Forest School activities and songs and stories

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• Practical advice on risk assessment and health and safety

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• Guidance on working with parents and carers

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• Adaptable planning templates

With a strong emphasis on providing fun learning activities throughout the year, this book will be essential reading for all those that want to provide high quality outdoor experiences for the youngest children in their care.

1		Outdoor learning What it is and why it matters

Welcome to this book

I hope that this book provides all the encouragement you will need to set up your own outdoor toddler group, whether as an interested parent or a childcare professional. From selecting an appropriate site and devising age-appropriate activities, to tips on staffing, working with parents and legal requirements involved, it offers a range of useful advice. It also gives an overview of the developmental milestones of children aged between one and three years, and offers guidance on how to meet their specific needs. I hope that you find it a useful and stimulating resource that sets you off on your own adventure!

In this chapter we will look at:

• what outdoor learning is and why it’s important;

• the benefits of playing and learning outside;

• some developmental benefits to children in the 1–3 years age range;

• some common myths and misunderstandings about outdoor learning;

• an outline of the different types of outdoor-group formats;

• a quick guide to what you’ll find in the rest of this book.

What is outdoor learning and why is it important?

To answer this question we need to look at our evolving understanding of outdoor learning and the ethos of the Forest School movement, before examining how it benefits young children in the 1–3 years age range.

History of Forest School

It has long been recognised that activity is beneficial for children of all ages, hence the regular timetabling of PE for school children and an emphasis on participating in sport during free time. Pre-school children are also included in this: local playgrounds are thronged with parents and children at the weekends, and there has been a rise in the number of indoor “soft play” venues for children under the age of five to bounce around.

But until relatively recently, there was little acknowledgement of the value of creative, imaginative play in a natural outdoor setting. This was perhaps because, for previous generations, access to wild areas and the freedom to roam was just as much a part of childhood as school and the tooth fairy.

In the last decade, however, children have had their freedom to roam and explore curtailed in many ways, and for many good reasons: concerns about child abduction, traffic and the growing scarcity of undeveloped woodland or wasteland sites have all played a part. Educational and developmental experts have queued up to tell us how our children are suffering from a lack of contact with nature (Louv, 2008). So parents are now faced with a dilemma: how can I provide the freedoms that I experienced for my own children in today’s world?

During the past two decades, the Forest School model of learning has been gaining ground in the UK. The Forest School teaching method that started in post-war Scandinavia has evolved into a worldwide educational movement, but in its original form it taught children practical outdoor skills, songs and stories alongside an appreciation of nature and community.

In its current form in the UK, the Forest School model for learning has been adopted by education authorities who value its impact on the social, emotional and cognitive development of children (Pilsbury, 2008). It has also been adopted and practised by many childcare practitioners and Early Years leaders who value its holistic approach to child development.

In essence, it fosters children’s social, emotional, cognitive and behavioural development through regular opportunities to explore and interact with the natural environment. Activities are led by trained practitioners and are designed to be open-ended, creative and to provide opportunities for collaborative working and reflection (Hopwood-Stephens, 2012). Children are encouraged to explore their own ideas rather than imitating the leader by experimenting with different approaches to solving a problem, such as finding suitable materials to make the roof on a shelter. The activities in this book have their roots in the Forest School ethos and focus on simple, creative activities that young children can participate in and enjoy.

Benefits of playing and learning outside

When we think about playing and learning outside, we need to get past the “weather factor”. A pioneering outdoor kindergarten in Sweden called I Ur Och Skur (Come Rain or Shine) goes out in all weathers. There is even a Swedish saying that there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing! (Robertson, 2008).

Wrapped up in waterproofs and wellies, children don’t really care about rain – what they notice is the colours, textures, sensations on their skin and the sounds of wildlife. As long as they are warm and mostly dry, they will happily play for ages. Restricting our children’s exploration of the outdoors to when it’s sunny and warm is misguided at best and neglectful at worst, because they miss out on a multi-sensory experience at a critical stage in the development of their cognitive, motor, spatial and communication skills (Keenan and Evans, 2009).

Of course, it’s not just the sensory stimulation that children and babies get from being outside. It’s also the experience of being in the open with space to crawl, toddle or even run. In other words, that sensation of freedom (Bilton, 2002) which most of us would find impossible to replicate within the confines of our house or backyard. They also get the opportunity to examine things closely, discover the natural world and familiarise themselves with a landscape (Bache, 2008).

So why the interest in trees and woods, rather than just going to the park or walking to the shops? Research indicates that the more trees and green space is available, the more the children will play (Taylor et al., 1998), and for longer, with games of greater complexity and imagination (Henninger, 1985), thus developing their social skills and language. There is also the option to manipulate and interact with their surroundings in a way which may not be possible in a private garden or manicured park – piling up branches and twigs to make a shelter for example, or picking flowers to decorate a nest made of grass clippings.

Evidence suggests that we all find visits to woodland restorative and stress-reducing (Forestry Commission Scotland, 2005), and research into nursery and infant-school children found that those enjoying regular outdoor activity had lower levels of stress hormone cortisol and took fewer days off through illness (Dahlgren and Szczepanski, 1998; Grahn et al., 1997).

From the child’s perspective, every day dawns with the possibility of new discoveries about their world. Infants and children learn by doing. When children are investigating their ideas outside, the usual restrictions on mess, noise and space that they encounter when playing indoors are no longer a problem, giving them more freedom to pursue their ideas.

Babies and children in the 1–3-year-old range

Learning and playing in the natural environment can be incredibly beneficial to a child’s development, even from a young age. A more detailed outline of child development theory and how it relates to outdoor play is given in Chapter 2, but some of the benefits to early development are summarised below:

Motor: in essence, babies develop and use simple schemes of movement when they are learning how to move their bodies. As young children, they refine and combine their schemes to learn how to execute more complex and extended movements. The opportunity to handle a wide range of objects of differing materials, sizes, weights and textures helps infants to refine and develop their skills of grasping, holding and placing objects. As they become more mobile, playing on uneven ground and the opportunity to climb on stones and logs helps to develop motor co-ordination better than playing on flat ground (Grahn et al., 1997).

Communication and language: playing and learning in a different environment, such as the woods, exposes children to a range of new vocabulary to describe what they can see, hear, feel, taste and smell. These words, often coming from a trusted adult carer, enrich a child’s developing understanding of the world and are given concrete meaning through being introduced in context, e.g. frost, prickly, magpie.

Regular outdoor play and exploration of open space can also introduce children to location vocabulary such as above, under, behind, over there, by, behind, in front.

Spatial awareness: a child’s sense of spatial awareness is most easily thought of as their awareness of where they are within a space in relation to the other things within it. As already discussed, playing in open spaces with varied terrain will provide plenty of opportunity to hear words and phrases used to describe the position of other people and things in relation to the child. Exploring these spaces and mentally comparing locations of different objects and people in relation to themselves will also help develop this awareness.

Social: babies and small children are only aware of their own needs initially, and are not able to put themselves in the shoes of others to imagine their thoughts or feelings. Being part of communal activities is fascinating to them nevertheless, as they are able to watch and imitate their peers’ actions. For children with highly kinaesthetic learning styles, watching and imitating the actions of someone else can be a more effective way of learning than listening to instructions.

Cognitive: children who attended the outdoor nursery in the study cited by Grahn et al. (1997) showed higher levels of concentration when attending to tasks indoors as the children in the ordinary nursery. They also played more imaginatively, inventing a wider range of games which lasted for longer.

Health: as counter-intuitive as it might sound, exposure to microbes and germs is an essential part of developing a healthy immune system to fight off infection. This doesn’t mean that we ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Outdoor learning: what it is and why it matters
• 2 Working with 1–3 year olds
• 3 Getting your site ready
• 4 What will I need?
• 5 Staying safe and having fun
• 6 Spread the word!
• 7 Planning
• 8 Activity bank
• 9 Useful links
• Planning Template 1
• Planning Template 2
• Planning Template 3
• Appendix: Risk assessment grid
• Bibliography