Children have a deep urge to explore and experience everything around them, trying to make meaning of their world. Through this they can competently construct their own learning, sharing their interests with tuned-in and supportive adults. Our role is to facilitate this by providing children with appropriate and stimulating opportunities in a wide range of forms. We can then support them to help them make the most of it over time.
Resources are an important part of the outdoor play environment. The kinds of resources available to young children can significantly affect the nature of their experiences. A practitioner can have a major influence on the quality of children's play and learning through focusing on the smaller, easily obtained resources that support aspects of provision such as pretend play, water play and growing. The best resources don't have to be costly, and by selecting those with high play value you need less in terms of variety, and can concentrate on having enough of everything to allow harmonious use by all.
What type of resources best support outdoor play?
When choosing a resource, a key consideration is its play value - in other words, how much it offers to the child for play. How many senses will the child use to explore it? Can this item be many things to the child?How many different ways might children use it?
Resources that are open-ended and versatile are so much more valuable for a child's play and for their creative, imaginative and cognitive development.
Being able to make one thing represent another underpins the ability to use written words and number symbols. Using what is to hand to meet the current need develops skills of problem-solving and resourcefulness.
Materials that encourage movement and exploration with all the senses help to create connections in the developing brain. Resources that support holistic experiences, where several areas of learning are addressed within a particular play experience, are so much more meaningful and effective for the child.
Natural materials (such as sand, gravel and pieces of wood) and recycled materials (such as crates, piping and old kitchen utensils) offer high play value. When a child fills a wheelbarrow with pebbles and transports it across the outdoor area to use as food for a picnic, many aspects of learning have taken place.
Staff at Bents Green Pre-school in Sheffield have been recording the myriad ways in which the children use a set of logs obtained (free) from a local woodland saw-mill. Children have used them for balancing equipment, stepping stones across a dangerous river and as sandwiches. The thinking, language and child-led learning taking place have convinced staff that these are among their best resources. Children can use crates to construct, fill, transport, jump on when upturned, or become a performance platform.
The staff have seen them used as a train, stepping stones and even a bonfire.
Resources that can be moved around by children (known as loose parts) enable them to work together and to design new structures or spaces. This opportunity to manipulate and change their environment can be enormously valuable both for learning and for the sense of being in control (and hence self-esteem).
Tyres, blocks, cardboard boxes, crates, A-frames and blankets are good examples of loose parts. Items that can be added to a basic fixed climbing frame, such as ladders and ropes, can create diverse structures and introduce novelty, whereas fixed structures can soon run out of stimulation for children and dominate or limit the use of the space. Where you do have fixed equipment, such as a playhouse, choose one that is as basic as possible, to which children and staff can add according to the theme or interest being followed. Flexibility is important for both large equipment and small resources.
What do we need resources for?
The outdoors is half of the learning environment, whatever the age of the child. Many children find the outdoors a more engaging place than indoors, a place where they feel more relaxed and more enthusiastic to move, do and learn. Children need resources outdoors that stimulate and encourage them to engage in all areas of physical, social and cognitive learning, and support their emotional needs.
It is important to consider how the resources you choose will help make best use of the special nature of the outdoors to offer your children experiences that cannot be offered indoors - especially things that involve movement, mess, noise and contact with the natural world:
* Pretend play : all forms of imitative, pretend, fantasy and role play (including bikes)
* Water play: moving water, ice, hose pipes, spray and bubbles
* Sand and other natural materials: wet and dry sand, gravel and soil
* Construction: play with building materials, dens, boxes, using wet sand as cement
* Creative play: exploring art materials, dance and music, representation
* Physical play: small and large physical experiences, running and dancing
* Exploring the living world: digging, sowing, watering, nurturing, harvesting and eating plants; animals, from mini-beasts to guinea pigs or chickens
* Using the weather: rain, sun and shadows, ice, frost and wind.
Observation of children will suggest further resources to respond to interests through short-term planning. It is likely that the resources added to support schemas and other interests will be valuable for other children, especially over time, and this is an effective way to add good resources to your everyday provision. Repetition is important for young children, so ensure that sufficient resources can be available to individuals over time; having to share resources can disrupt the learning process.
What about safety?
New resources, whether newly purchased or donated, need to be assessed for hazards. These depend upon the developmental stage of the children, the nature of the item and the potential ways in which it will be used. Don't accept resources that are in poor condition or present an unacceptable level of risk, even if they are donated free.
Children's safety is paramount and all resources can present a risk, so this approach should be a normal part of your practice. It is important to balance the degree of safety with the educational benefits of the experience to children. Assess risk to enable, rather than to remove experiences from children.
Jan White is senior early years development officer, Learning through Landscapes
More information
This article is reproduced from Early Years Outdoors materials, the outdoor play support service for all early years providers of care and education for children from nought to five years. For further information or to subscribe, contact the EYO helpline on 01962 845811 or e-mail eyo@ltl.org.uk or see www.ltl.org.uk.
A useful list of good resources for outdoor play can be found in A Place to Learn from eys.advisors@ lewisham.gov.uk 020 8695 9806.