Fall outdoor Activities.

This is a great time of year to start a nature science corner on your playground. This is a place in the fall to collect everything that is falling to the ground, such as leaves sticks. Have children use magnifying glass to investigate these fall objects. In the nature center allow them to sort and classify leafs by different characteristics. This is a form of math and meets many states early learning standards.

Why do children find the outdoors boring?

Inside, we tend to have lots of manipulatives for children: things that they can move and build with and adjust and change. When we take our children outdoors, we only provide them with static gross motor equipment or other static play items. Without manipulatives, the children quickly become bored and make manipulatives out of whatever they can find in the environment, such as turning a stick into a gun. Some ideas for manipulatives would be tubes through which the children can drop balls, sticks or any other objects they find and play with. Create a tracking panel or a gravel panel that children can drop objects down. A sand table, loaded with shovels and buckets so children can build and manipulate the sand, provides hours of enjoyment. Anything that can be used outdoors that will allow children to build and move and reshape their environment will create hours of interest and reduce supervision problems.

What can be done better outdoors than indoors?

For today’s blog, I am going to focus on messy things and why it is so much better to do them outdoors. I think of a preschool art easel and how much work teachers go to indoors, taping newspaper on the walls and the floors to make sure if children splatter paint or spill things, they can easily clean up the space. Outdoors, if we are using a biodegradable paint, there is no need for this. We can simply let the paint hit the grass and biodegrade. Also, when it comes to clean up with an outdoor art easel, you just take your water hose and squirt it down. Sensory tables frequently have messy items put in them that require clean up after use. Many times the items we put in a sensory table are biodegradable, such as bird seed, cornmeal, oats, etc. Take messy sensory table activities outdoors, so when children spill things the local birds and creatures will clean up after them. This brings wildlife to your playground, which is another important asset to an outdoor classroom. If you have ideas or questions on things that can be done better outdoors, please comment or contact me.