Developing the Outdoors Environment

I have been thinking about this and reading up on it for some weeks now and have today pulled together some initial lists and quotes (mainly from the EYFS).  I have cut them out and added them to a poster that I am making, with cutouts from magazines of equipment that I would like to have in the garden.  I'm going to put it up and ask the parents to contribute to the poster with their ideas about what is important to them about outdoors, what resources they would like to see out there, what their children enjoy outdoors at home, and any other ideas they may have.  I am hoping to be able to get the parents on board by giving them a wish list of 'found items' that would enhance the outside and see what they can ferret out for us to use!

Effective Practice (EYFS, 2008)

o Encourage children to help plan the layout
o Encourage children to contribute to keeping the area tidy
o Ensure that children can be outdoors daily all year round
o Help children to understand how to behave outdoors by talking about personal safety, risks and the safety of others.
o Link the indoors and outdoors so that children can move freely between them.

Challenges to tackle (EYFS, 2008)
o Promoting the value and importance of the outdoors to parents and other professionals.
o Meeting the needs of children of different ages in a shared outdoor space.
o Reflecting learning outdoors in observations and planning.

What the EYFS (2008) says about children being outdoors:

“Being outdoors has a positive impact on children’s sense of well-being and helps all aspects of children’s development”

“Being outdoors offers opportunities for doing things in different ways and on different scales than when indoors”

“It gives children first hand contact with weather, seasons and the natural world”

“Outdoor environments offer children freedom to explore, use their senses, and be physically active and exuberant”

“Children can learn to make decisions, solve problems and grow in confidence in their own abilities outdoors and they need plenty of time to investigate their outdoor environment purposefully”


“Outdoors, children can hear and respond to a different range of sounds, beginning to recognise and distinguish between noises in the outdoor environment”


“Outdoor learning complements indoor learning and is equally important. Play and learning that flow seamlessly between indoors and outdoors enable children to make the most of resources and materials available to them and develop their ideas without unnecessary interruption”

“Provide children with access to environments that stimulate their need to explore and which safely challenge them. The aim is to develop their risk awareness and an understanding of their own abilities as necessary life skills”

Developing the Outdoor Space
1. Evaluate where we are now.
2. Vision Planning – where do we want to be??
3. Action Planning – How can we get there??
4. Implementation – making the changes!

Resources and Play Materials
1. Open-ended and non-prescriptive, and can be used in imaginative ways that fit the children’s play, rather than dictating the play.
2. Different sized and shaped logs, poles, sticks and wood shapes.
3. Blocks, crates and tyres.
4. Natural items: sand, water, leaves, stones, bark, earth, mud, clay, shells, seeds.
5. Ropes and strings of different thickness and length.
6. Different colours, textures and sizes of fabric, cloths and tarpaulins.
7. Clothes pegs.
8. Pulleys.
9. Baskets, bags, buckets, containers,
10. Pipes of different shapes and lengths.
11. Chalks, charcoal, crayons, pens, pencils, brushes with water, paints, large paper and fabric, rollers.
12. Tools for digging, planting and caring for plants.
13. Tools and benches for woodworking.
14. Nets, bug pots, magnifiers, binoculars, trays, tanks.


Key Features to Plan For
1. Access and security.
2. Shelter and shade.
3. Appropriate clothing.
4. Appropriate storage.
5. Variety of surfaces.
6. The four elements.
7. Natural spaces.
8. Growing spaces.
9. Active spaces.
10. Reflective spaces.
11. Creative spaces.
12. Social spaces.
13. Offsite locations.

Plenty of food for thought here.... I will post about how I tackle each area over the next couple of weeks.  this is part of my ongoing review of 'The Learning Environment' section of the EYFS.  It has taken me, and some members of the childminding group on quite a journey so far; because the learning environment covers indoor, outdoor and emotional environment, there is a lot to consider, reflected by recent posts about supporting emotional development, ICT and others.  You might be interested to read the toolkit that has helped me review the outdoors, to be found on this post here!

Friday's Favourites!

Well it's been another busy week.  I got started on my outdoor plans in style, as a very lovely little picket fence was installed across the patio by a fab handy man.  I promised a post about my plans last weekend but time and energy refused to play ball, so I'll try again this weekend!  Having said that, I'm off to London all day tomorrow for a Montessori seminar, so energy may be in short supply again by Sunday!!

I took the long overdue step of hiring an accountant yesterday, best thing I have done in ages (thanks to Nat for her number!!), a huge weight off my mind and as she is so coversant in accounting and the legalities of it, I will be claiming for capital allowances that I didn't think I ever would be able to, and a larger proportion of expenses than I thought I could, so feeling better off than I have in a while too!

We continued to have lots of fun this week with our rainbow theme, more pics to post on that, it turned into a  week of discovery and sensory fun that I really enjoyed as well as the children.

Other exciting news was that my grant money came through so I have ordered most of the equipment on the list, feeling very lucky to get some money and looking forward to put it to good use!

And now to this weeks best finds in blog-land:

• Lots of downloadable activities here to support colour recognition.
• Loving this salt dough tree trunk fairy house, would be a great holiday project for older children!
• These exercise ABC's are great fun, I'm going to print a set and laminate them for my outdoors area!

Have a great weekend!!

Rainbow Crayons!

From This............ to this!

I had the idea for these from here, but knew that making them as individual colours would bore the children and be messy and time-consuming, not to mention a bit dangerous with molten wax sloshing round! So I tweaked the idea a little bit and here is how to do it:

1. Collect together old and broken wax crayons (or buy a big box from the pound shop!!)
2. Let the children peel the paper off them (normally forbidden!!!!)
3. Snap them into lots of little pieces (also normally forbidden!!)
4. Get out an old bun tin and wipe round the indents with a kitchen tissue with a tiny amount of oil on.
5. Share the broken crayons out amongst the indents, trying to get a good mix of colours in each one.
6. Pop the tray into an oven at 150 degrees C.
7. Keep a close eye..... the crayons take only minutes to melt.
8. Once melted take them out and put on a heat proof level surface to cool and set.
9. Once the tray is cool, further harden them in the fridge.
10. Turn the tin over on a table and pop them out.
11. Watch the children's amazed faces!!

They look a bit grim from the top whilst they are in the bun tin, as the colours mix into a browny film, but underneath they are magical!!!!

Tree Planting Together!

Last week we went with the childminding group to a local nature reserve and planted out some saplings that had been donated by The Woodland Trust.  There were Wild Cherry, Rowan and Silver Birch.  The trees were about two years old, very small and just the perfect size for toddler hands to plant independently.  And plant them they did! Two of the girls really got the hang of it and planted lots, coiling the rabbit proof tubes around the stems and pushing a stake in to support the saplings.  One of the littlest just bumbled round the woodland with a stick in his hand, poking things, but he loved it!  The Ranger was so impressed with the children that he has invited us to go and use the reserve whenever we wish.... a real treat as it is a protected site with rare species of plants and animals!

Our Montessori Visitor!!

This is Nicola, a member of the childmindinghelp forum who contacted me about Montessori.  She came to visit me to see some of the Montessori materials that I have and talk about how both she and I use it in our settings.  It set me thinking about how to write on here about Montessori, and I'm finding it hard because once you talk about one part of the theory, then you have to explain another bit and the whole thing just snowballs into something that sounds very complicated when it isn't!  So here is what I'm going to do: I'm going to break the essential parts of the philosophy down into bitesize chunks and post about them individually, making them relevant to childminding and adding links and suggestions for implementing it in your setting. 

Funnily enough, even though Montessori developed her theory a hundred years ago, there is a lot of it in the EYFS - look here for a document written by Montessori Centre International (MCI), a training college in London.  The director of that college, a wonderful lady by the name of Barbara Isaacs worked together with the editor of the EYFS to produce this and it would make a good starting point if you are interested in following the Montessori story with me! 

As we go on, you will also start to recognise aspects of the Montessori materials in popular children's toys - you probably have many of them in your setting right now and didn't realise their origins!!! Take the knobbed cyclinders below for example, do the buttons on top of the cylinders look familiar? Got any wooden shape puzzles on your shelves? there you go!!! The cylinders themselves are part of the sensorial materials in Montessori, but the button on top helps to develop a child's hand strength for writing as they hold it with a 'tripod grip' in three fingers also.  More of that later!

As a final incentive for looking further into Montessori, although it may seem like more hard work to start with, it can actually make your job as a childminder easier, because there is an emphasis on developing independence and care for the surroundings! I hope you'll come back for more and comment as we go.... I will answer all the questions I get to the best of my ability!!!!

Friday's Favourites!

I have been a bit quiet on the blog this week, things have been very busy at home and I've got a chest infection for the first time in my life so I feel rotten too!  Incy Wincy week was a great success with the interactive story telling and the marble painting apider webs the biggest hits.  None the less both my own children have had nightmares about spiders this week, oops!  I've been doing lots of thinking and note-making about my outdoor area this week, and have some great plans to make it happen, more about that sometime this weekend hopefully! For now, here are Friday's best picks to inspire you for next week!

• Cootie catcher nature game from 5 Orange Potatoes.
• Growing herbs indoors: we will start sowing some seeds today... this makes them look really pretty too, and it's nice to sow some for your setting and some to take home too!

Helping Children to Recognise Their Emotions

 

No, they weren't completely bored by the childminding group..... they were making 'emotions faces' as part of our ideas sharing about activities to help young children recognise their own and other's emotions.  It was really funny and made me realise how hard it is to pull a face when you are thinking about it!!  Everyone at the group 'made a face' and we are going to have copies of the photos each to use with our mindees!

 

other ideas we talked about were:

• A decorated box with a mirror inside stuck to the bottom, tell the children that the box has something special and important inside and invite them to open it and look!
• Hold a teddy and say that teddy is excited because he is going swimming later, encourage the other children to say why teddy isnt excited as they pass him round, this helps children to recognise feelings and teddy can experience any feeling you want him to!
• Print this template of a face out on skin tone paper or on white and colour it in with skin tones, then laminate it and use it as a playdough mat, helping the children to model sad and happy faces on it.
• This sheet can be used to draw faces that have been talked about or experienced in stories etc.
• I found some simple faces to make puppets with - you could call out emotions and the children can pop them up, or they could have one or two each and if you call out that emotion they have to hop on one leg, or run to the corner etc, or you could read a book that involves emotions and the children can identify them as they come up.
• Here are some stories that you can print out or read online, some are to do with emotions, others carry a moral story.
• These pictures can be used to make bingo cards, but I think they are quite complex for young children so I would either use them with older children, or pick some contrasting ones for the littler children.
• A feelings and emotions colouring and puzzle book that supports diversity too (4 years plus).
• Dice to use for 'pull a face' games (perrhaps we should have used these at the group today!!).
• Photographic posters of adult emotion faces.
• Flashcards of clipart type emotions faces.
• This article talks about strategies to help child control their emotions.
• Emotions Bingo
• Lots of lovely ideas here to explore different aspects of emotions