Outdoor play link-up - Easter Egg Hunt in the Forest

I have been going to the woodland classroom at Peatlands Park with my nursery class for the past 4 years and we have enjoyed an egg hunt onthe day nearest to our Easter break every year. The basic idea is that we discover a letter from the Easter Bunny after eating our snack & it tells the children that they have to find 10 paper eggs that are hidden around the forest, 5 stripy & 5 spotty. 

As they find each egg they have to bring them back to me & I keep count until 9 have been found.

Then we count them all together & discover 1 is missing, they run off to search a little more before we decide to look around where I have been sitting - and guess what it is stuck to my bottom! 

I think this is their favourite part. The last egg leads us to a map that tells them where the eggs are hidden - on top of Teletubbie Hill. 

They all run to it to find a basket full of chocolate eggs, (or if the bunny has forgotten the basket, he puts them in some wellie boots!) they all get 3 eggs each to eat before we then roll our painted boiled eggs down the hill. 

I think it may be the simpliest yet most effective egg hunt ever.

 My favourite post from last weeks link up was Rainy Day Mum's on the frog hunt in her pond in the back garden.

How did your kids play outdoors this week?

Share your ideas for outdoor play activities with us every other week! The linky goes live every second Friday at 12:01 GMT+1. Here are just a few guidelines for sharing:

• Any kind of children's outdoor play-related posts are welcome!
• 
  If you'd like us to further share your post (e.g., on Facebook/ Twitter/ Pinterest), please just include a link back to this post (either in your post or sidebar) to help us spread the word about the importance (and fun!) of outdoor play! Each time we will feature an activity from the previous party. By contributing you are giving permission for an image and link to your post to be republished. (If you have been featured, please feel free to grab the 'featured' button from the sidebar.)
•  

On top of the world

Is there anything like that feeling of being up high, looking over fences or down on peers?

IEF Project: Learning through Play - Learning for Life - Learning to Care.

When we received our funding from the IEF a big part of the project was the 6 days we planned to spend working with a professional artist, Grainne Kielty, to create permanent pieces of artwork for each school to have as a reminder of the project. My school & St. Patrick's had already had an opportunity to work with Grainne to create a Very Hungry Caterpillar Tree for our classrooms, so we agreed that this project would be an ideal opportunity for Sperrinview to gain a tree too. Having done joint art projects before we knew that 2 days in a row spent working with an artist is the best way for the children to see a big project right through to the end. 

There are over 60 children involved in this scheme, yet thankfully because of the sheer size of the outdoor area at Sperrinview we were all able to enjoy 2 days in each others company without it becoming too overwhelming. The 2 visiting classes were able to  have their snack outside, on arrival & then the 3 classes could explore the beautiful grounds while small groups of children went inside to work with Grainne.

For most of the children this was the first time they had been inside the school, in a classroom and it was an opportunity to introduce them to the children who are in wheel chairs & hadn't been able to join us on our previous days in the forest. It was a learning curve again for all involved again, and some of my class spent a long time just staring at the wheelchairs or following the children around the room.

By the end of the 2 days most had no problem accepting that some of the children couldn't talk or walk. Grainne was brilliant at always making sure every child was included, no matter what their ability. One little boy was fascinated by the glitter, so gave him a big bowl of it to play with & placed some of the wet, freshly painted branches near him so he could 'spread' the glitter on them. 

Every child traced their handprint to create leaves for the tree, I haven't got a final photo yet but will post one next week.
These 2 days were a perfect end to the week & the fact it was beautiful spring weather made the time spent outside even more pleasant. The children loved playing with the water features, piles of leaves & climbing up & down the bank. There is a wealth of fixed equipment in the playspace which the children enjoy exploring but probably spent the most time on the steep bank.

The next part of the project involves the 60 plus children coming to my school to spend 2 days working with ceramics - we can't wait!

Guest post - The Great shed roll to create a tea house.

One of the first blogs I came across was Takoma Park Cooperative Nursery School's. I have enjoyed following this wonderful blog & watching their outdoor play space develop & change. I am so delighted to have Lesley Romanoff Director at TPCNS write a guest post this week for my blog. This is a post about how the 'can do' spirit of cooperative schooling shines through. It is thanks to Lesley that I introduced parent volunteers to my classroom this year. So sit back & read this post & enjoy the video of the shed roll.

The finished tea room

Our playground’s story is a chapter book. The first chapter doesn’t even take place at our current location. That chapter takes place at our much-loved location and is filled with more examples of the forward-thinking nature of our parent community. They renovated the playground there; specifically researching and purchasing only play structures that could be moved. Before long, that is exactly what happened. We found out exactly how much a flat bed could hold and how deep to dig to plant a slide, a seesaw, etc.

When we landed at our new site, our primary focus was the interior spaces. The bungalow had not been used as a residence for years. In the late 80s and 90s, it was a daycare. We gutted it for its current iteration for our parent cooperative school. And when I say “we,” I mean, parents and staff. We only hired a handful of professionals and the rest was dogged determination and elbow grease, or rather spackle.

We brought the playground up to speed and settled in knowing that the playground would be the next thing we would tackle. A student’s grandfather worked with me to develop a plan for the playground. It involved destinations and pathways as well as height and texture in the form of key plantings. Then Phase 1, or the next chapter was written. The sandpit, the campsite, the tubes (purchased for the old school, but not installed), and the seesaw were installed or rearranged. The dirt was moved from the new sandpit to create a berm and these are two of the best features of the playground.

The dust cleared and settled, but there was one destination/component from the playground plan left to be created and it was a playhouse. We couldn’t really figure out where it would go once everything was “planted.” So this chapter begins with two moments in time.

The first moment, a parent asked me why our storage shed wasn’t painted like the school (we are keen on the bright and saturated colors). I didn’t have a real answer. The only thing I could come up with is that I just didn’t acknowledge the shed’s existence. In fact when I went through the hundreds of photos we have of our outdoor space I couldn’t find a reasonable photo of the shed or a view that included the place that would become the Children’s Teahouse and Rock Garden.

The second moment came soon after on a brutal hot day during our summer art camp. I was sitting on one of the sandpit’s boulders (you get to do this with mixed-age classes) while looking at the Montessori Services catalog. I looked up at the shed (grump) and then wondered about a rock garden and how to heave ho the shed to create a playhouse, without actually losing the shed.

And there you have it. Well, except for the HOURS of labor moving the shed to the back of the yard (here is the video and HOURS of fundraising and HOURS of digging, building, and moving rocks! Those hours will be traded, joyfully, for HOURS of play, imagination, and collaboration. As always, this beauty was pulled off with the help of the parents and the children. The parents are modeling community involvement and the children adopt it in a very real way. 

Stay tuned as we create our next playground feature takes shape…a dry creek bed!

The children breaking the ground for the dry creek bed project

Outdoor play link up - Going up the slide.

When I visited a kindergarten in Eikefjord in Norway, the first thing I noticed was that the children were allowed to climb up the slide as well as coming down it. I watched all week & never saw anyone get hurt or injured, instead I witnessed lots of co-operation between children & great skills at managing to climb up the slippery slide.
It has always been the rule (it seemed to come with the slide) in every nursery I was ever in that 'Slides are for going down not up', but when I came back to Dungannon I sat down & talked it over with the assistant I work with, we decided to try allowing the children to climb up the slide. We are lucky to have 2 slides so we can say one is for going up & one for going down, if it gets busy. So 4 years on the children are always amazed in September when they are allowed to climb up the slide, we have to tell all students & staff that we allow this otherwise you hear 'You can't go up a slide' - isn't that the silliest thing ever, of course you can! We also allow them to come down the slide head first or backwards.

We have found that the children will find different ways to get up, either by asking another to help them up, or by climbing on a chair at the side of the slide. We have also found then enjoy climbing off the slide or over the side & we don't stop them from doing this either. 

The only rules we have are that anyone climbing up must wait until the other child has made it to the top & only 1 child at a time can come down the slide.

From the many posts in the last link up my favourite was from Flights of Whimsy. I just loved the way the children taught each other how to master climbing the tree. I am so envious of the wonderful outdoor area they have in the school, I would love to have trees that the children could climb in school.

How did your kids play outdoors this week?

Share your ideas for outdoor play activities with us every other week! The linky goes live every second Friday at 12:01 GMT+1. Here are just a few guidelines for sharing:

• Any kind of children's outdoor play-related posts are welcome!
• 
  If you'd like us to further share your post (e.g., on Facebook/ Twitter/ Pinterest), please just include a link back to this post (either in your post or sidebar) to help us spread the word about the importance (and fun!) of outdoor play! Each time we will feature an activity from the previous party. By contributing you are giving permission for an image and link to your post to be republished. (If you have been featured, please feel free to grab the 'featured' button from the sidebar.)
•  Please feel free to grab the Outdoor Play Party button from the sidebar and/or include a text link back.

An Creagán - New experiences all round!

This week the class had their first visit to what they affectionately call 'The Big Forest' at An Creagán as opposed to Peatlands which is now 'The Wee Forest'! The Wild Woods site at An Creagán is a lot larger than the woodland classroom & has 3 ponds and various steep banks to climb - it is set in a disused quarry.

I had shown the children some photos of the area taken on a visit with last years class, so that they had an idea of what to expect. Experience has shown that it makes for a much smoother visit if they are 'familiar' with what to expect when they get there. We had spent a few days taking about safety around the fire & the ponds, the best aspect of The Wild Woods is that it still has education officers on site who will set, light & maintain a fire & are on hand to help the children go pond dipping.

The biggest lesson for me was that it is much less stressful if it is just my class, who I am sure of & who I know have been well prepared for the visit. On this occasion we were our 2 partner schools as this was one of the activities from our 'Learning through play - Learning for life - Learning to care' project. So there were over 60 children in the area at one time & 7 of these were children with severe or moderate learning difficulties. I had not allowed for these children having absolutely no concept of danger - they would step off steep cliffs or plough into the ponds - with their poor teachers having to just follow after them. So during this project I have learned that it is not feasible to just take all children into the same areas, 'The wee forest' and their own wonderful outdoor area are a challenge enough for these children. The other nursery class were also not as adept at climbing as my class & struggled if they got stuck. 

This again proved to me that my class are very resiliant & have really learned to attempt almost anything by themselves this year. 
We had all 4 seasons on this one day, beautiful spring sunshine, rain, hailstones & sleety snow! We had all just got settled around the fire for lunch when the hailstones came on and we had to admit defeat & move inside.

One child keep saying 'What are those white things that hurt my hands?' and I realised that just because I know what hailstones are doesn't mean that the 3 or 4 year olds do. We had left school at 9.40 & then headed back at 12.40 & the children sang & chatted the whole way back, only 1 fell alseep, so I think the lunch had revived them. We will have 2 more visits to the big forest before the end of the school year - on our own - and they can't wait to go back & bring our popcorn pan to cook on the fire.
Outdoor days like this are only possible because we have so many wonderful volunteers - parents & past pupils & funding from our PTA.

Honoured to be doing a guest post..

I was so pleased to be asked to write a guest post for the brilliant Takoma Park Co-operative Nursery School, please check it out.

Outdoor Play Link-Up - Risky Business

I have written 2 previous posts on risk taking here & here. I am a firm believer that is young children are actively encouraged to take calculated risks & decide for themselves as early as possible, they will have fewer problems later in life. When the children are trying something for the first time they are encouraged to decide how far they want to climb, how much they think they can do totally by themselves or how comfortable they are about the sense of 'danger' they may be feeling. 

All adults working in the class are told not to lift children up anywhere or when in the forest not to hold their hands while they might walk along a pole or tree if it is somewhere high up that they couldn't normally reach on their own. In the 4 years that I have been taking this approach no child has been injured or got stuck. Children are sensible & unless they have some medical reason for it, won't put themselves in any danger. They do know their limits but also have a great sense of self-belief & I love watching them practice something over & over until they can do it easily.

It is so hard to choose just one favourite post from the link up but I just loved the photos of the children playing in a blizzard in Ontario over at Happy Hooligans. It was wonderful to see the children so engaged & busy & almost oblivious to the snow.

How did your kids play outdoors this week?

Share your ideas for outdoor play activities with us every other week! The linky goes live every second Friday at 12:01 GMT+1. Here are just a few guidelines for sharing:

• Any kind of children's outdoor play-related posts are welcome!
• 
  If you'd like us to further share your post (e.g., on Facebook/ Twitter/ Pinterest), please just include a link back to this post (either in your post or sidebar) to help us spread the word about the importance (and fun!) of outdoor play! Each time we will feature an activity from the previous party. By contributing you are giving permission for an image and link to your post to be republished. (If you have been featured, please feel free to grab the 'featured' button from the sidebar.)
•  Please feel free to grab the Outdoor Play Party button from the sidebar and/or include a text link back.