Children's Outdoor Play

The practitioner in an early years setting supporting children’s play learning and development is extremely important, as play helps stimulate the child’s brain, supports their needs on an educational level, as well as helping them with social difficulties such as building relationships, developing them and helping them gain confidence. Many people believe that a child learns best when they are motivated, such as Fredrich Froebel. He believed that children benefitted from all types of play. The McMillan sisters believed that outdoor play was extra important as they studied children who played and slept outside and discovered that they were the happier and healthier children in comparison to those who only played inside.

We looked at the process over product. In the creative arts area, we were unable to get suitable images (Only product not process) and our expectation involved children activities. Then we filtered by Reggio Philosophy. During this, we found a good selection of images. Our group collaborated by exchanging our e-mail and using Facebook. This collaboration helped us to get many different ideas with each member accessing our group board and contributing the best images they selected. Therefore, we narrowed our work to collect the most suitable images. We found out what materials were used for many infant and toddler activities indoor and outdoor. For example, some of the materials that were used for painting outdoor and indoor are bark, pine cone, tin, mirror, cotton, bottle and bubble

Observations- practitioners ask the child to come over to them and do a task which the practitioner would like to see if the child can do it can be as simple as kicking a large ball to knowing whether a child know which way to read the book left to right.

The relationship between play and learning seems obvious to many child professionals and parents, and yet there are still lack of understanding surrounding the importance of children's play. Some people believe that children need to "work" not play, and that playing serves no useful purpose in a learning and development environment. This is surprising considering that play, with its high levels of motivation and potential enjoyment empowers children (as well as people

The observation was a very interesting and informative process. It gave me the opportunity to apply different theories of development. The biggest advantage of this psychological method is the opportunity to observe the subject in the natural surrounding and watch his natural behavior.

It is important to observe the child carefully, closely and to listen to them in different situations to ensure that the teacher is clear about what their needs are, their strengths and difficulties. It is important to observe the

8. Practise! The best way to develop your skills at observing children’s development, learning and behaviour is to do observations on a regular basis.

Many skills and areas of development overlap. A child will not be able to learn a physical skill without the development of their cognitive, social and communication skills as well. The areas of development may be separated but it is important to remember that they do not work on their own but together.

1. We will provide coloring sheets for the younger children with several fruits and vegetables in each color group. We will provide an attractive display of rainbow foods for sampling.

In addition to play promoting pleasure as well as physical activity, play forms the holistic growth in children’s development, or to put it in another way using Brown (2003) acronym, acknowledged as ‘SPICE’; play represents the ‘social interaction’; ‘physical activity’; ‘intellectual stimulation’; creative achievement and emotional stability, (with the addition of “compound flexibility”) in a child’s development. Compound flexibility is the idea that a child’s psychological development occurs using the relationship between his/her environment with the adaptability of the child himself. Thus the flexibility of surroundings and his/her adaptableness can provide children the means to explore; experiment and investigate (Brown, 2003, pp. 53-4). On the contrary, the absence of social interaction and physical activity through the means of play can inhibit children’s overall development and without the consistency of play children suffer a “chronic lack of sensory interaction with the world, [which leads to] a form of sensory deprivation” (Hughes, 2001, p.217 in Lester and Maudsley 2006).

Observation is something that educators do carefully to gain information about young children. Documentation is the process of collecting evidence that serves as a record. When teachers observe the young children, it provides the information that the teachers need to build relationships with individual children and enable them to be successful learners. The best way the teachers should learn about children by carefully watching them, listening to them and studying their work. When the teachers are watching and listening to children helps us understand what they are feeling, learning and thinking. Observation is an excellent way to track children’s

Play significantly affects the development of the whole child. Within play’s natural learning environment, children develop cognitively, socially, emotionally and physically. One dominant method use in the study of play is through naturalistic observations. In naturalistic research, the observer does not intervene at all.

Play-time is an essential part of early childhood development as well as their most primitive form of expression. In an article titled “The Importance of Play” by Bruno Bettelheim, he refers to Sigmund Freud’s thoughts that play is a child’s first step in attaining “cultural and psychological achievements”. (Bettelheim 324) The

Play helps equip children for what life may throw at them. Children are born to be actively engaged and explore the world with their own eyes. Through play children learn what it means to fail in life as well as what it means to accomplish a goal. Play is not only a strategy to keep children entertained in early childhood, but also allows children to learn how to create and work together at an early stage. Children at play has been undervalued by society without realizing that “playfulness is that benign base on which the most valuable worlds of children can be successfully built (Iakov, 2012, p. 25),” meaning that play is a fundamental strategy that assist children to develop experiences for the future. It is very upsetting that society

Play is an important part in a child’s learning experience as children learn best from being actively involved and experimenting. The Foundation Phase wants practitioners to recognise that children learn through first-hand experiential learning in an environment that is relevant to a child’s interest. Hall, N. and Abbott, L. (1992) support this as they suggest “not only is play beneficial but also