Early Years Outdoors: Children’s Centre

During 2009 I was asked to lead another project at a Children’s Centre in Leicester (having been part of the Creative Partnerships Early Years work in children’s centres since 2007).

This time it was with a pre-school group of children aged 3 and 4 and their practitioners. With Joy Lambell, the children’s centre teacher and co-leader of this project, the question we were addressing during this project was this:

Can working with a creative practitioner, in the outdoor spaces, to change the thinking of staff and parents, have significant long term gains in creative learning and communication for children as opposed to just working with the children?

Children mostly just played on bikes during times outdoors so we wanted to offer other provocations and ideas.
A priority highlighted  in the school and the children’s centre SEF documents at the time was the raising of standards in speaking and listening.

Really what this means is that I was to demonstrate some ideas for practitioners which encourage learning outdoors as well as supporting them in their interaction with the children.

We aimed to have most of this project happening outside and I started by building some structures outside (with colleague sculptor and 3D artist Matt Shaw). We made a coppice pole wigwam, a tube-o-phone in the tree and on the fence, a metal spinner, a speaking tube and a few other provocations.

During the project we used large scale brown paper and masking tape, cellophane, string, water, ping-pong balls, clay (with the help of artist Rachel Barnett), typewriters, air pumps, musical instruments indoors and out, black and white paint, string, chalk mark-marking and we had made a digging bed. Messy play was to be encouraged.

These interesting objects and open-ended activities are designed to provoke questions from the children as well as imaginative language/play.

As well as this we tended to have a guided music session at the end of the day when we would play instruments and make up songs together. Children would contribute words and music. At the end of the project we had an outdoor music session with parents and  a book was made for them for parents and carers to see the ideas we used and how their children responded to them.