Stimulating resources, combined with challenging, thoughtful questions, are central to effective learning in young children. Only then will they be able to explore skills and concepts and so develop their ideas.
Yet poor resourcing and resource management are often the greatest barriers to high-quality play in the outdoors. Settings often fail to prepare resources in advance or are unable to move them outside quickly. So, a flurry of snow - and children's enthusiasm for it - may have passed by the time the practitioners have assembled the resources for exploring a wintry day.
Resources
In this series, we will show how practitioners can prepare and use sets of resource bags - one for each area of learning, and all stored in one bigger bag. Such sets will enable settings to respond quickly to events and children's interests and offer children opportunities for cross-curricular learning on any given day.
It important that the bags are offered as an addition to, rather than instead of, the outdoor provision contained in a setting's long-term plans.
Skills and concepts
As well as preparing resources well in advance, settings also need to consider the skills and concepts that may be explored through the resource sets. A kite, for example, may lend itself to explorations of speed, height and size.
Questions
Practitioners should reflect on the open questions that they will need to ask in order to support and develop children's understanding of these skills and concepts - for example, 'What happened when...?', 'Why do you think...?', 'How long did it take for...?'
PLODs
To assist practitioners in their planning, the series will suggest main ideas for exploration and PLODs (Possible Lines of Development), which provide links between indoor and outdoor learning and are vital in deepening and consolidating children's learning.
Claire Warden is the founder of Mindstretchers, an educational resource provider in Perthshire, tel: 01764 664 409