Outdoor learning has been proven to be extremely beneficial to a child's learning in many ways. The children at our setting enjoy going on our nature walks, community farm visits etc But these activities aren't always easy to do. We feel our outdoor area is lacking that magical touch to encourage and continue the same level of learning which we are able to provide indoors. We spoke with our children during our circle time discussion and showed them a few options regarding Outdoor learning spaces and they all chose a 'Hobbit hole' structure which we as a team thought was a magical idea!
What we'll deliver:
- We will be building a 'Hobbit hole' Outdoor learning space for our children.
Why it's a great idea:
This addition to our setting would improve the overall quality of our learning and would enable is to ensure the quality of learning Outdoors would match that of our Indoor learning environment. This particular idea would expand our children's imagination and encourage us to focus more on the 'Understanding the world' section of the EYFS curriculum.
Five benefits of an Outdoor learning environment are:
- To develop self esteem, take personal responsibility, co-operate with and respect the needs of others;
- To extend their personal horizons through greater appreciation and understanding of the world and its peoples around them;
- To understand the need for sustainable relationships between people and their environment;
- To enhance practical problem solving and team work skills.
- To promote a positive and knowledgeable response towards personal health and well being
Steps to get it done:
- Buy the structure and hire a builder to build it in our outdoor area.
We feel our setting is very much apart of the local community as our parents and our children's siblings are extremely influential with a lot of our settings decisions. It is a partnership. Having spoken to our parents we found a lot of our children don't have much opportunity for outdoor learning so we feel the benefit of our project would be immeasurable.
