Benefits of
outdoor learning
Playing outdoors offers children access to new, open, and large spaces, with fantastic opportunities to be their natural, exuberant, physical, and noisy selves. Being outdoors offers the space and ability to move freely with physical and mental positives for children. This encourages a healthy lifestyle from a young age. Children create a sense of appreciation and understanding for the natural environment when they experience it first-hand. Learning about the world around them, from how things grow to where they live, from the seasons to the weather, every experience helps to build a child’s knowledge and awareness of the world. Experiencing the feel of the rain tapping on their heads and the cold on their hands and cheeks. Seeing living animals crawling on their hands, peering down a rabbit hole and observing a sunflower grow, these are all learning opportunities that enable children to grow as caring and considerate individuals, with awareness for the world around them. Being outdoors also offers sensory experiences to explore and learn, developing gross motor skills, running, walking, bending, stretching as well as fine motor skills for example collecting smaller items such as leaves and conkers. Children can develop different skills from the outdoors, skills they may not be able to develop indoors. Social skills can be improved from experiences sought outside, interacting with peers and adults in different environments. Many children develop confidence from outdoors, where spaces are not so confined and areas that can sometimes be less noisy than the indoor learning environment. Some children can find this a more calming learning space.
The outdoors can encourage independence, allowing children to risk take and explore environments they may not otherwise get access to. The outdoors can offer problem solving skills and opportunities, the ability to use imagination and different resources to support this such as during role play. Turn taking skills and developing relationships are often discovered through activities outdoors, for example waiting for a turn to balance along a fallen tree trunk. The outdoors also offers many pedagogy areas for learning, literacy, maths, science, and sustainability too, giving the early years a good grounding at the start of their learning within these subjects. Areas within the EYFS framework can be assessed and benefited from being experienced outdoors offering different ways of encompassing the early learning goals within a setting. Personal, social, and emotional, communication, language and literacy, problem solving, mathematics and reasoning, knowledge and understanding of the world around them and physical development as well as creative opportunities are all available from being outside. Activities outside can be set up or discovered by children themselves creating many learning opportunities in a calming outdoor space, many children thrive in this environment. The outdoor environment also offers many well-being benefits, equipping children for their future, allowing them to self-regulate, feel emotions for themselves and recognise feelings in others. Children can let off steam, explore, learn new skills, and develop relationships with their peers and the world around them. The outdoor natural environment can offer opportunities to learn these powerful skills. The benefits to outdoor learning are, indeed, endless, and invaluable.
Northampton High School now run many toddler groups for boys and girls, join them on Friday mornings for their Forest School Session: Learn and Grow! Contact them at junioradmin@nhs.gdst.net or 01604 667979 to book your place. 12 July - Sept 2022 Toddle About
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