Movement play is central to two-year-olds’ physical and emotional development. Having mastered locomotion, the outdoor environment should offer opportunities to climb, jump, slide, bounce, balance and run. Moving around large-scale loose parts and pushing, pulling and carrying items and wheeled toys allows children to test out their growing agility and dexterity. Close interaction with the natural world enables them to use all their senses to explore the changing environment.
‘Two-year-olds are continually investigating how things work, moving items around, taking them apart and undertaking close observations,’ explains early childhood consultant Julia Manning-Morton, author of From Birth to Three: An Early Years Educator’s Handbook, which won Professional Book of the Year at the Nursery World Awards 2024. Being in outdoor natural environments gives children plenty of opportunities to carry out these investigations. ‘They are fascinated by the effect of their actions on other people, objects and substances and need to repeat their experiments again and again to see if the effect or result is the same or different,’ she adds.
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