Prof Jan White

Would you like to pilot a new (free) online course on Physical Development?

Guest post, Training / Leave a Comment / By / September 4, 2020

An important strand of work for Early Childhood Outdoors is to support and share developments in good quality training opportunities at all levels, so that practitioners can enhance their understanding and practice across relevant areas and along a continuum of levels.  Freedom, stimulus and possibility for moving and being physical is of course one of …

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Opening up the outdoors after lockdown

Guest post, Pioneering Centres of Inspiration / 2 Comments / By / September 4, 2020

Having opened last October to the wettest autumn ever and then had to close in March due to the lockdown Janet Packer, co-owner/manager of Growing Wild Outdoor Nursery in Barnsley, continues to share their fully outdoor journey with the ECO meshwork as they cautiously reopened this June – with the same optimistic surprise that many …

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Making a Mud Kitchen grows ever more international for Mud Day 2020!

Book Recommendations, Resources / 2 Comments / By / September 4, 2020

Liz Edwards, founder of Muddy Faces, and I met way back at the beginning of this century (2001 I think it was) and we’ve been working in an increasingly collaborative way ever since – the core of this began 10 years later with our shared love of and belief in MUD.  This year, International Mud …

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Moving makes toddlers happy!

Guest post, Videos from Siren / Leave a Comment / By / September 4, 2020

Early Childhood Outdoors works with organisations and companies sharing the mission to increase the amount and quality of outdoor experience children from birth to seven have in their daily lives.  Through liaising with a wide range of ‘collaborators’ our aim is to enhance each other’s work, enabling and supporting however we can. Dipping once more into …

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Pandemic Possibilities Outdoors

Guest post / 1 Comment / By / June 15, 2020

One hundred years ago, amidst prevalent airborne respiratory diseases including TB and Spanish Flu, the very popular Open Air Movement gave great attention to providing children of all ages with a combination of health-improving conditions that included large amounts of time in cool, fresh air.  Indeed, the British Nursery School tradition was born from this …

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Staying true to why we work in the way we do

Guest post, Pioneering Centres of Inspiration / 5 Comments / By / September 4, 2020

As settings begin preparations for moving out of lockdown towards a new normal, a great deal of anxious thinking and careful planning is being carried out throughout the UK.  We’ve heard before from a parent in the Beatle Woods Outdoor Nursery community and in this post, owner/manager Rachel Macbeth-Webb shares a passionate call for us …

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Mainstreaming learning outdoors as part of our new normal

Advocacy, Guest post / 3 Comments / By / February 11, 2021

The current situation with most children staying at home has caused many a personal reflection on how we have been living our lives, what actually matters to us and what children really need for on-going wellbeing and healthy development.  And of course this has also sparked many a thought for how we might find and …

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Reasons to be outside in the coming months

Advocacy, Resources, Therapeutic work with the outdoors / 1 Comment / By / January 5, 2021

Building on the great success of our little booklet Making a Mud Kitchen, each year Liz Edwards and I collaborate in producing a freely available resource (funded by Muddyfaces) to support our shared vision and goal of more children thriving outdoors, more often and for longer, benefiting from richer and more meaningful environments offering authentic, …

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Silver Linings

Guest post, Pioneering Centres of Inspiration / Leave a Comment / By / September 4, 2020

Following the shock of having to temporarily close or significantly limit the numbers of children attending during the emergency pandemic response, emotional upheaval and destabilisation for staff is likely – especially in a newly opened setting that is working hard at becoming established.  Negative feelings can easily be front-of-mind, perhaps focusing upon what is being …

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Dandelion Virtues: the merits of the undervalued ‘weed’

Book Recommendations / Leave a Comment / By / September 4, 2020

Dandelion Virtues: the merits of the undervalued ‘weed’ – and some more books about dandelions! Ralph Waldo Emerson apparently said that a weed is ‘a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered’, and my reply in the previous Dandelion Appreciation post was that the dandelion is a plant whose virtues we had already long …

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