Our Favourite Outdoor Play Activities
Meet Jessica, mother and member of our fantastic Parent Panel*; a diverse community of Bright Horizons parents sharing their experiences of raising happy, thriving and confident children. In this blog, Jessica shares her son’s favourite ways to play outside.
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Eddie and I have always both enjoyed spending time outdoors. Whether it be a dewy sunrise, frosty morning, wet afternoon or a sunny evening, we get ourselves dressed for the weather and get outdoors.
I regularly see numerous benefits in getting outside for both of us. For Eddie, exploring his surroundings keeps him curious. He’s recently realised that, when we walk underneath a small local train bridge, if he makes a sound, it echoes. So, he makes different sounds, to see how the sound changes as we go under it. It’s fascinating to see!
I also see his creativity growing; he’s a big fan of collecting rocks and sticks. He uses them in a variety of ways - to drum on different things, to make a bird’s nest, to see if there are any bugs underneath, and sometimes simply just to make a big pile.
Eddie was an early walker, keeping me on my toes from an early age – it’s wonderful to see his physical development progressing over time. He is a particularly keen climber, but getting outside encourages movement in so many different ways, whether it be climbing, crawling, walking on different textures and gradients, or terrifying me by swinging on the bar at the top of slides!
Getting out also helps to build his social skills. We regularly see and chat with others in our local playgrounds, and I can see Eddie’s confidence growing over time as he gets more secure at approaching new people to make friends with. Perhaps sometimes a little too confident, when he wants to join in teenagers’ football games, but we also use these examples as learning points and discuss why we can’t always join in with someone else’s game. As a two-year-old, he’s not always happy about this but it’s an important life lesson.
One of the big factors that led me to choose Eddie’s nursery was the large outdoor space they have. Each room has its own garden, but they also use and/or share other rooms gardens, allowing the children to mingle across age groups, and see their friends again who didn’t move rooms at the same time as them. His current room’s garden has so much to explore, including trikes, a sand table, bats and balls, and mud kitchen and low things to balance on. It also has a small slope at one end, which I often see used for rolling balls or themselves down!
In addition, the staff regularly set up activities - a recent one, forest play, included binoculars to look at glove puppet animals which had been placed in a tree. As the doors are open for a lot of the day (weather permitting), the children are free to roam between their room and the garden, which massively increases their space to explore.
As a family, we really value our time outside. Now that the evenings are getting lighter, you’ll often find us all pottering around in the garden doing a bit of gardening together, or playing at a local playground, for as long as we can, until we lose the light which is our cue to head home to bed.
If you enjoyed this article and found it to be useful, you can check out more of our early childcare resources in our Family Resource Zone!
And, if you’re not yet a Bright Horizons parent, but are interested in what our nurseries can offer your child on their exciting educational journey, book a personal tour at your local nursery today!