Creating an engaging and challenging outdoor provision

Year 1 outdoor provision – what resources would you use? What areas of learning would you create? Will you have it open all year and in all weather or only when it is sunny and warm? How are you going to make sure that your children are challenged enough?  Are they still challenging themselves when you are not around?

We have asked ourselves these question hundreds of times and are always on a mission to create the perfect Year 1 outdoor provision. A provision which is engaging yet challenging. A provision which creates a chance to develop these skills which are specific for outdoors –  gross motor and physical skills, like lifting and moving large and heavy objects. 

We moved our resources and let the children explore. Then after close observations decided to add alternative resources and moved around the learning areas again, and again and again…

We have to admit that our children treated outdoor as a playground rather than a learning environment and we had to stop them from running around without a purpose.

There is a list of areas you “should” have in your provision – sandpit or sand tray, water tray, mud kitchen etc. When creating our outdoor space, we have asked ourselves what are they learning in the sand tray? What new skills will they learn by splashing in the water tray?  These two quickly disappeared from our provision — we replaced the sand tray with our mud pit. Children can dig for a purpose and use the mud in our mud kitchen.

  

Our children still have a chance to play and investigate with water but instead of a shallow, little tray filled with plastic fish, we gave them pipes, gutters and a water butt. All these create an excellent opportunity for problem-solving, collaborative working and moving water over a distance while practising those gross motor skills.

 

 

"Hop! Hop! Can you hear me?!

We have invested in good quality open-ended resources, and large construction blocks are must on everyone’s shopping list. Our children love them! They build cars, tanks, Santa sleigh, and buses. The skills our children have a chance to develop by using large blocks are balancing, transporting, enclosing, bridging, building and combining materials…the list is endless!  

  

  

Another very popular area is den building, which again is very open ended. What you can make with a piece of tarpaulin, pegs and string?

To stop children from running, we created little nooks outside, where children have a chance to “rest” and “calm down”.

Our reading hut is a hit – children love to “hide” in there.

 

 

Observational painting of nature or working with clay are the latest additions to our outdoor provision.

 

We divided and defined each area by placing pots with flowers and shrubs. 

 

Is it working? Are children engaged?

Yes, definitely! We got them thinking, engaging, collaborating and stopped the running. They started to plan their learning independently. They spend more time engaged in one activity rather than fleeting between them like it was before.  

As we wrote at the beginning of this blog, we are on a mission, and we still have lots of work to do for the new cohort coming next year. We may need to rearrange the learning areas and resources, and move again and again and again…

Aga and Lucy