Ideas to explore: Showing care and concern for living things Resources: Flower pots and 'easy-to-grow' seeds, such as nasturtiums or marigolds
PLODs: With the children, plant some seeds in flowerpots outdoors. Discuss which conditions are necessary for growing seeds. Encourage the children to care for the seedlings.
Ask: Do all the seeds grow at the same rate? What happens if there are lots of seeds in the same pot? What happens if seeds are left unwatered?
Ideas to explore: Listening to stories and expressing ideas
Resources: Flowerpots and small- world dolls
PLODs: Introduce the 'flowerpot friends' to the children and develop stories around the adventures they might have when they climb out of their flowerpots to explore the garden. Encourage the children to imagine what might happen to the flowerpot dolls in various scenarios, for example in the sandpit, on the logs, or under the bushes.
To stimulate children's ideas and conversations, introduce other props for the 'flowerpot friends' to use on their adventures - for example, a small pebble, a piece of string, a square of material, a magic twig.
Ideas to explore: Use flowerpots to develop children's awareness of size and sequence
Resources: Flowerpots in a range of different shapes and sizes
PLODs: Encourage children to find the largest and smallest flowerpot. Try to place the flowerpots in a sequence, for example height or diameter.
Ask: Is the pot with the largest diameter also the tallest? How many times can the contents of the smallest pot be emptied into the largest pot before it is also full? Can the flowerpots be stacked inside one another?
Ideas to explore: Investigate and examine flowerpots to find out more about them
Resources: Flowerpots of different shapes and materials, for example glazed and unglazed clay, plastic, compressed card
PLOD's: Spend time examining the different flowerpots. Discuss their similarities and differences, their texture and appearance.
Talk about the purpose and properties of each type of flowerpot. For example, decorative glazed pots have a long-term purpose and are designed to look attractive, whereas compressed card flowerpots are used for seedlings and are designed to be placed straight into the earth where they can rot away as the plants' roots outgrow them.
Series guide
Poor resourcing and planning are the greatest barriers to high-quality outdoor play. In this series, Jan White and Gail Ryder Richardson of Learning Through Landscapes' early years team suggest simple resources that can provide stimuli for cross-curricular learning and give possible lines of development (PLODs). By focusing on resources that are cheap, easily prepared and easy to store, practitioners can then respond quickly to children's interests and events outdoors. More ideas on creating high-quality outdoor spaces are available from LTL Early Years Outdoors, tel: 01962 845 8111.
