We have spent a great deal of time outdoors these past few weeks! It feels so good to be outside! Outdoor play is essential for your child’s health and well-being. The sense of peace and pleasure our children experience when they take in fresh air, feel the warmth of the sun, and watch a butterfly land gently on a flower is immeasurable! What is so evident is how much they all enjoy running, jumping, climbing, and just being outdoors! As teachers, it is a great way for us to enrich curriculum and support their development of learning!Being outdoors helps with your child’s:
Social/emotional development: Children experience a sense of accomplishment and growing competence when they spend time outdoors and they are engaged in purposeful activities. What a sense of accomplishment some of our little friends have when they climb to the top of our new playhouse, throw or catch a ball, and learn how to pedal a bike! Their social skills grow as they experience sharing our equipment with each other, such as our bikes and shovels, work to
gether in our sandbox, and follow our safety rules.
Physical Development:
How lucky we are to be outside! It is so much healthier for us to be using our muscle activity. We are also developing gross motor skills as they run, leap, hop, jump, swing, slide and climb. This also allows them to take risks and try new skills. They are also using thier fine motor skills outdoors to work on our garden, collect bugs, and pour sand through a tunnel in our sandboxes. What fun!
Cognitive Development: When we are outdoors we like to study bugs and butterflies, plant seeds, and watch our garden grow! In the fall, we watch leaves change colors. In the winter, we taste and play in the snow, and this spring we have touched the bark of a tree, and smelled the fresh rain air after a rain shower! We count the seeds we plant, the number of petals on spring flowers, note different patterns and colors on flowers, count how many flowers we see on a wagon ride, and we will watch water run through tubes during our summer outdoor water play!
Language Development: Some of our vocabularies will really expand as we learn the names of insects, flowers, and plants, and learn some different characteristics: fast,fuzzy, shiny, hard, colorful, the list is endless! We learn about traffic signs on our walks and learn to identify birds, flowers and bugs we discover.
Feel free to join us on our outdoor adventures. Have a great day!