Indigo Outdoors

Within our Early Years’ service, we are extremely lucky to have a woodland space within the grounds (which was needing a little tender loving care) and it sparked conversations around some of the wonderful learning opportunities we could open up for our children and families.

The team began talking to our preschool children about our current outdoor learning environment and what they felt was missing, “trees” was a particularly common comment, although our ‘playground’ outdoor learning environment provides rich and meaningful opportunities for learning and development, it very much resembles concrete and fencing with limited opportunities to experience the natural environment – unless adult assisted (mud added to the mud kitchen, plants growing in the planters).

Our amazing team dedicated days of hard graft, a few aching backs, not to mention muscles we didn’t know we had! They cleared, brushed and organised the space so that our children could use the area safely.

Our children led and directed this work, risk assessing our new space, helping the team determine eye-level hazards such as low branches and talking about the various types of risks and how they look for risks and hazards during their play.

Planning out the space and making designs of what it needed to be. To some, it might just look like an empty space under trees – to our children and team, it was a blank canvas of fun, learning and endless opportunities.

One of the most common uncertainties from our families when our children began using the woodland learning environment was “will my child get hurt?”. As parents/carers, our natural instincts are to protect our children, from the minute they are born, to their first crawl or steps; therefore, feeling unsure or anxious about some types of outdoor play is a natural reaction.

We wanted to support our families in understanding that, in allowing children to have access to ‘safe risks, ’ we can help them make better judgments and decisions about their safety and the safety of others as they grow.

Children need to be given the chance to ‘have a go’, to try new things and test out their own ideas, which can mean that they might get a bit dirty, they might have a fall or a small bruise or some tears.

However, it is these experiences that are an important part of learning, developing confidence and growing the skills that are so necessary in being able to assess personal risk and mitigation.

As adults, we know that everyday life involves a certain level of risk; the earlier children are able to risk assess their own play and their decisions, the more confident they are likely to become in future years. Now that isn’t to say that practitioners stand back and allow children to climb 6-foot trees or swing from branch to branch.

As professionals in early learning, the team have worked with the children to develop their understanding of risk management in their play. In the early stages, some practitioners had to work a little harder than others to change their own mindsets around risks and safe play.

The team now confidently facilitate experiences that allow the children to manage risk appropriately, they have conversations about what the children anticipate will happen next, supporting them to problem solve and think ahead.

We have an amazing vision as to what our new learning environment could be, and we can’t wait to see it grow and develop over the coming months and more importantly, to see the positive outcomes our children will achieve as a result! – WATCH THIS SPACE!!