Movement Rich Outdoor Play
Physical play is crucial for a child’s development. It’s not just about keeping them active; it’s also about fostering their motor skills, coordination, spatial awareness, and even their cognitive development. Providing ample opportunities for children to play, explore, and experiment with their bodies and surroundings is essential for their overall well-being.
Creating environments that promote unimpeded movement and exploration outdoors can enhance children’s physical development and overall well-being. Outdoors, the sense of open space can inspire energetic movement and exploration. To maximize this, it’s essential to provide wide and long views, allowing children to see the potential for movement and play. Incorporating interconnected pathways, tunnels, and bridges not only adds excitement but also encourages movement and exploration. These features provide opportunities for children to navigate, climb, and traverse, stimulating both physical activity and imaginative play.
Providing a diverse range of ground surfaces for children to explore outdoors offers numerous benefits for their physical development and sensory experiences. Each type of surface presents unique challenges and opportunities for movement, encouraging children to adapt and develop their motor skills in various ways. For example, hard, flat, and resilient surfaces like tarmac and concrete provide stability and are suitable for activities such as running, biking, or playing ball games. These surfaces offer predictability and support the development of balance and coordination. Alternatively, materials like bark, sand, and gravel that give way underfoot enhance proprioception and encourage sensory exploration. Walking or playing in these materials requires balance and coordination, contributing to the development of core strength and stability.
Incorporating opportunities for children to explore vertical movement and different levels in outdoor play settings is essential for their physical development and sense of adventure. By leveraging the three-dimensional nature of the outdoor environment, educators can enhance children’s experiences and encourage them to engage in diverse movement activities. Unused sloped areas can be transformed into dynamic play spaces by adding steps, stepping stones, small slides, or wooden slopes with securely attached pull-up ropes. Manipulating the landscape by digging dips or creating hills in flat grass areas provides opportunities for children to explore changes in elevation and develop balance and coordination. Offering a variety of alternatives for vertical movement allows children to make choices based on their interests and abilities, promoting autonomy and self-confidence. Additionally, comparing and contrasting different methods of going up and down enhances children’s critical thinking skills and spatial awareness.
Providing large vertical and horizontal surfaces for children to engage with encourages whole-body movement and fosters the development of various motor skills. Outdoors, walls and fences can be utilized effectively by attaching materials such as cotton sheets or plastic for large-scale artwork or weaving activities. Encouraging children to paint with water or mark with chalk on surfaces like tarmac, paving, brick walls, wooden sheds, or rubber tires provides opportunities for creative expression while also engaging their gross and fine motor skills.
Creating spaces and providing materials for digging and filling activities is an excellent way to support children’s physical development and satisfy their natural curiosity. A large outdoor sandpit, for example, offers a comprehensive workout for gross and fine motor development while providing endless opportunities for exploration and creativity. By providing ample space and appropriate materials for digging and filling activities, educators and caregivers can support children’s physical well-being while encouraging their natural curiosity and sense of wonder.
Loose materials can be gathered, handled and manipulated, piled up, collected into containers, transferred between containers, mixed together and carried about by children. Outside as well as sand, gravel and soil, water is superbly manipulable substance that can be contained, poured, transferred and transported. It is clear that the greater the scale that the children are able to work at, the greater the demand on all aspects of physical development, and being outdoors allows for the use of larger, heavier and more awkward resources as well as offering a larger, more physically demanding space and landscaping to interact with them. To get the most out of this provision match the offer of loose materials with lots of interesting and enticing containers. Provide a wide range for filling and carrying, especially those with handles to encourage transportation, including baskets, buckets, watering cans, jugs, saucepans and metal teapots. Add some large containers that are heavy and difficult to lift when loaded to increase the challenge and invite collaboration – big buckets or bread and milk crates are good examples. Children also love to be involved in the tidying up after play, such as fitting the blocks back onto the shelves, sweeping sand back into the sandpit or washing down muddy equipment, holds its own fascinations and embeds action, control and coordination into the everyday life of your setting.
Bikes and other wheeled vehicles are superb resources for pushing and pulling with legs, arms, back and shoulders activating muscles, joints and tendons. Moving fast and turning corners are movements that stimulate the motion-detecting vestibular system which underpin balance & control. Moving through space, especially fast down a slight slope, and working every part of your body as it is used to push, pull and lean feels fabulous. Strength, flexibility, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness and timing are also amongst the physical benefits gained from playing with wheeled toys. Wheeled vehicles are also fabulous for encouraging lively social and collaborative play with the associated demand on social skills, children can practise and develop the critical personal skills of self-regulation and self-control. To get the best out of vehicle play, select resources carefully to create a good range of different types of vehicle (trikes, scooters, balance bikes, carts, pushchairs, wheelbarrows and scooters) and ensure that they are both a wide range of things that children can do with them and good physical challenges for their use. In particular, levels of interaction and the quality of play are greatly enhanced by incorporating vehicles into interesting, relevant, well-planned and supported role play, remembering to encourage energy and action!
Young children love to dance and are very responsive to music. This is an especially effective and important aspect of physical development, and is easy to provide outdoors. When music is played or a song sung, children will respond through facial expression, gesture and bodily movement. Music is particularly effective at supporting emotional and social development. Rhythmic movement is a great way of incorporating all components of physical development. Providing ribbons and scarves involves the shoulders, arms, wrists and hands, legs and feet.
Ensure that children can access downtime and recovery whenever they feel the need. Young children experience rapid transitions in energy level and ability to cope with an active, busy environment. They quickly go from full-of-beans and enthusiasm to sudden exhaustion with great need for rest and recovery. Planning for physical development in any outdoor environment must make provision for opportunities for downtime and restoration. Children should not need to wait for allocated times for this and are best served when they can select what they need as an individual from a variety of comfortable, quiet and protected withdrawal spaces. Important elements that make good places for regeneration are withdrawal and protection on the one hand, and softness and comfort on the other. Garden seating, hammocks, swing seats, sofas, rocking chairs, quiet corners, dens, nooks and crannies made by planting and screening. Adult laps are particularly effective places for recovery, so make sure there is plenty of comfortable seating to suit adults outside too.
