Enabling Environments: Making Spaces...Literacy

We have a great outdoor area shared by our reception and nursery and some children would choose to spend all day out there if we let them. We know the outdoors is good for them but it means they don't engage with all of the activities indoors, particularly opportunities for independent reading and writing. What kinds of activities can we provide outdoors to support their literacy development and how do we encourage a more balanced use of the environment?

There have been two schools of thought about the use of outdoors. Is it an outdoor classroom that replicates most of the activities found inside or should it be a purely natural environment providing something very different? There is something very special about being outdoors - the children have fresh air on their faces and the sky to gaze up at and a bit more room to run around in and be physically active. We aren't always aware of just how much this physical activity is linked to the more formal tasks of reading and writing. Just as an example, stretching and climbing, crawling and creeping, lifting and carrying are all linked to the hand and eye development needed to hold a pencil, or scan a page.