Outdoors: key 7 - Cause and effect

How long has it been since you have considered the strengths and weaknesses of your outdoor learning environment? This Key points attention towards the physical ‘landscape’ itself and how children are encouraged to make use of it.

KEY 7: QUALITY OF THE OUTDOOR ENVIRONMENT

The outdoor space should be:

• interesting, ever-changing and a pleasure to be in for long periods
• varied, with a range of different surfaces, levels and places with different qualities, offering lots of ways to be both active and calm
• reflective of different aspects of nature, with plants, trees, animals, natural materials and weather effects
• flexible so that children can act upon, modify and cause change
• maintained regularly.
  
  

WHY IS THIS ISSUE KEY TO UNLOCKING THE OUTDOORS?

If the full potential of learning outdoors is to be harnessed, the setting’s outdoor environment must be a pleasant place to be in for both the children and the adults supporting them. If the practitioners in your team are not physically and emotionally comfortable in your outdoor space and do not really want to spend time there, then this will inevitably limit children’s daily access and how well their learning can be supported.

What do your staff feel about your outdoor environment? How enjoyable it is for them to use? (Keys 4 and 5 are also relevant here). Secure boundaries and entrances, lines of movement and lines of sight affect how comfortable practitioners feel about their ability to ensure children’s safety. Suitable shade, sufficient shelter, softness, comfort and seating all contribute to how good the environment feels, and how much attention is then freed up for supporting children’s enquiries and play.

The full developmental value of the outdoors will only be realised if we focus upon its unique and special nature: especially variety, the natural world and the extensive opportunity to act upon their environment that young children crave.

WHAT DO WE NEED TO BE WORKING ON?

This Key focuses upon turning your outdoor space into an enticing and dynamic place to be in, through three interacting strands. The vision is to create an outdoor environment that has different types of surfaces and ground levels, which compensates for the limited opportunities offered by floors indoors. Playing on a mound, grass, bark chips, or steps lends itself to a much wider range of movement – which adds greatly to the developmental value of playing outdoors. Alongside this, increasing the range and types of spaces within the overall environment provides places with different feels and stimuli, increasing the possibilities for exploration and play.

Ensuring that there are some quiet, calm and peaceful places as well as spaces that encourage boisterous, noisy play is an important first step. This differs from the idea of ‘areas’ for specific types of experience, such as a predetermined ‘music area’, and movement and interaction between these places should be facilitated.

The second element is the presence and action of nature, both living and physical (sand, water, weather and so on), providing softness and nurture as well as variety, change, chance, curiosity, fascination and imagination. Natural elements offer the huge to the tiny, and bring children into intimate, meaningful contact with the real-life rhythms of the day, year and living itself. An important consideration here is how to capture so much more of the potential of the outdoors through ‘annexing’ your locality and community, in the streets and nearby places.

A really good outdoor space provides interest, stimulation, investigation and experimentation through real and relevant experiences. But the most important element of a high-quality outdoor environment is flexibility: the degree to which children can interact with it, act upon it, and cause things to change. The most profound experiences for children come through extensive opportunity to actually create their own environment, experiencing the effects of their own efforts and of working together.

Maintenance is also an important component of this Key. Outdoors, surfaces, features, materials, equipment and resources are subject to both wear and weather, and as a result, the outdoor environment needs constant attention and a suitable budget.

HOW TO MAKE A START AT DEVELOPING PROVISION AND PRACTICE

Things to consider, discuss and evaluate

• Is your outdoor environment a pleasant, enticing, dynamic and fascinating place to be in?
• Is the environment complex: are there many places and ways to be active and calm?
• Is the environment flexible: are there abundant opportunities for making things happen and for causing change?
• How well are trees, plants, animals, natural materials and weather effects providing nurture, curiosity, investigation and play?
  
  

Things to read

• ‘A responsive environment: creating a dynamic, versatile and flexible environment’ by Ros Garrick in Outdoor Provision in the Early Years, edited by Jan White (Sage, 2011), pp 57-67.
• ‘What Makes a Good Outdoor Environment for Young Children?’ by Jan White and Helen Woolley in Exploring Outdoor Play in the Early Years, edited by Trisha Maynard and Jane Waters (Open University Press, 2014), pp 29-41.
• Nature Play At Home by Nancy Striniste (Timber Press, 2019).
• ‘Outdoor experiences beyond the garden’ in Playing and Learning Outdoors by Jan White (Routledge, 2020), pp 195-220.
  
  

Things to do

• Look at the range of floors children spend most of their day-to-day lives moving on indoors: how much variety and demand or difficulty is there? Now pay attention to the range of surfaces that exist outdoors. What could be introduced into your outdoor space to add to the challenge, effort and physical competence it calls for?
• What can children actually act upon, make happen or cause to change in your outdoor areas? Notice how much young children want to do this and how they seek out ‘cause and effect’ wherever they can find it!
• Plant a shrub or tree in your outdoor space, in the ground or in a large container. The Woodland Trust has a range of suitable small trees and gives advice on selection, planting and care.
  
  

How to organise your outdoor area, by Jane Wratten

Different sized spaces

Open spaces are important for running and transportation – try to keep them free of too many obstacles in the middle. However, it is good to have ‘islands’ (such as seats, tyres, planting, little earth mounds) and pathways at the edges for manoeuvring around. More intimate spaces can be created in corners or along boundaries by using free-standing/fixed trellis or pallet panels. Roofing one over with a tarpaulin or trellis and a climbing plant will make it even more enticing.

Seating

Seating or ‘perching places’ such as low walls, steps, pallets, tyres or crates connected with planks will add interest and complexity. Children will use them as surfaces to play on, and staff will benefit by being able to sit down at the children’s level – observing the play and encouraging conversation.

Plants

Resist mowing grass for a few weeks to provide leaves and flowers for children to pick and use in their play. A little pruning of a large shrub could open up a tunnel or space to hide behind.

No green at all? Tyres (free from any garage) lined with landscape fabric and filled with topsoil and a circle of turf could be a great start. Newly planted areas of any kind will need a lot of protection until well established – use trellis or netting. It will be tricky keeping the children away, but well worth it in the long run.

Jane Wratten is a landscape designer and outdoor nursery practitioner

Professor Jan White is author of several books on outdoor provision and practice and co-director of the specialist training company Outdoors Thinking