Many learning opportunities that are difficult to experience if you’re stuck inside a classroom. This is where learning outside the classroom has as its advantages. Whether your children are in daycare or preschool, we will highlight the benefits of leaving the four walls of the classroom and taking learning outside.
Relevant Learning
When learning takes place outside of the classroom, it can be easier to make some concepts relevant and real as they can be put into their natural environment. Sometimes it’s difficult to get your children’s heads around a concept when they are inside the classroom, but it may be something that’s easier to grasp when it is in context, which could be in the outdoors. By simply going outdoors, your children may become more motivated and eager to learn a new and tricky concept.
New Opportunities
The beauty of learning outdoors is that it’s not confined to the playground. Consider the number of places that you can take your children, where they may not have been before. For example, farms, museums, zoos, and galleries.
Behaviour Issues
Quite often when children are outdoors, their behavior improves. This is because learning outdoors allows children to be motivated and engaged, thus happy in a daycare setting.
Engaging Learning
It can be hard to keep children on task, particularly when the weather is nice outside and the term is coming to an end. There’s no reason why you can’t just take learning outside and let them burn off any built-up energy. For example, if you consider mathematics in the outdoors. You could ask your children to guess how long they think it will take them to run, walk or tiptoe across the playground. Then, when back inside the classroom, you could discuss their findings and turn this information into a graph.
Promote Imagination and Creativity
When children are given the opportunity to learn outside, they have the freedom to explore. As a result, this can produce more creative and imaginative results. For instance, if you are learning about ruins, it would make sense to take your children to see ruin and incorporate this with some drama or role-playing. Quickly, you’ll be able to see how your children’s imagination becomes active and lots of questions will crop up. These questions can help with any role-play that you take back to the classroom.
Boost Health
You may just be in the playground for your outdoor learning, but this opportunity can provide children with exercise and fresh air.
Experimenting and Play
It goes without saying that children learn better when they are engaged and interested and therefore, play is an amazing way of learning. Another great way to learn is through experimentation. For example, young children can learn far more about texture and volume by playing and experimenting with sand and water. For older children, for example, if your topic is minibeasts, in the outdoors, children will have the opportunity to become nature detectives and be able to see and learn about these minibeasts, in their natural environment.
With our on-site nature trail and large playgrounds, students at Mt. Elizabeth Academy have great opportunities to play and learn while they are outside!
