Recently, our Outdoor Play has been full of active bodies, curious minds, purposeful play, and meaningful learning. Our Outdoor Learning is very much led by the children’s interests, with their ideas guiding the direction of play and learning. As they explore, investigate, and create, they are developing creativity, confidence, and a wide range of skills across all areas.
The children have been:
- Designing and building bridges and structures with loose parts, working together to plan, test ideas, and think about balance and stability.
- Exploring ropes as a learning resource, investigating length and learning how to move together as a group. This developed teamwork, communication, coordination, and core and arm strength. When ropes became tangled or stuck, the children showed excellent problem-solving, stopping to think and find solutions together.
- Using tyres in whole-body physical learning, rolling, lifting, carrying, stacking, and positioning them. This required strength, balance, coordination, and cooperation, while also encouraging the children to count how many tyres they had stacked.
- Investigating the natural environment, searching for bugs, examining them closely, counting them, and sharing what they noticed.
- Exploring light and shadows, observing how shadows change in the sunlight and creating drawings and mark making from their observations.
- Being creative through art, mixing colours, experimenting with tools and materials, and working collaboratively on shared artwork.
Through this child?led Outdoor Learning, the children have been developing creativity, communication, cooperation, problem?solving, physical strength, confidence, independence, and self-management — all in meaningful and enjoyable ways.
These photos capture just a snapshot of the rich Outdoor Learning taking place each day.
