OUTDOOR ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF OUTDOOR LEARNING

Children love playing outdoors and exploring the world around them. They learn naturally and react to the weather, the seasons and find an infinite number of ways to interact with their environment. Skilled practitioners use children’s enthusiasm to take the learning to the child. They build on a child’s imagination and interests to facilitate learning. We believe that the outdoor area is a complete learning environment, which caters for all children’s’ needs-cognitive, linguistic, emotional, social and physical. It should be available every day alongside the indoor class and throughout the year. When outdoors children have space, freedom fresh air and time to work at their current interests and to develop their thinking in a practical way. It provides a vital space to use trial and error and higher thinking skills to problem solving and make links with previous learning. It provides the ideal cross-curricular environment and with skilled facilitating results in high quality learning for all abilities. Therefore, we recognise the need for repeated and regular contact with the natural environment, especially for children who do not have access to nature as part of their everyday lives.

• Building confidence and independence
• Feeling empathy for others and nature
• Physical fitness
• Health benefits
• Improved mental health
• Learning by experience
• Exposure to manageable risk
• Better sleep and mood