Environment and Design

Enspirement: The world-first platform transforming the early years’ experience through meaningful environmental design

The introduction of ‘enabling environments’ as a key principle in providing effective early childhood education and care (ECEC) has itself enabled a great leap forward in thinking and practice.  As someone who is fascinated by the relationship between organisms (children especially) and their surroundings, I’ve long witnessed that the environment is in fact the first …

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Outdoor experiences beyond the nursery garden

I recently enjoyed exploring some local residential streets with the team at Growing Wild Outdoor Nursery in Barnsley, and was reminded about the incredible treasury of fascinating and important things to be found in the ordinary, everyday places where people live their lives.  These are places we tend to overlook in providing high quality Early …

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Learning through Nature

Way back in 1997, Robin Moore and Herb Wong wrote a book documenting the incredible transformation of an American school’s grounds from an exposed asphalt desert into a nature-filled paradise of happiness, wellbeing and highly motivated learning – called Natural Learning: the life history of an environmental schoolyard and subtitled ‘creating environments for rediscovering nature’s way …

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The Chilean quest for introducing outdoor learning and play in early childhood education

With this week’s post, we are excited to announce the official launch of our new Early Childhood Outdoors Vimeo channel!  Over the coming year, we hope to add visual material so that we have a lively companion for this more word-oriented blog, for celebrating, sharing and motivating across the ECO meshwork.  We are especially looking …

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The Wondrous Walk

Our wonderfully successful collaborative research webinar Where Are the Babies, hosted by the Froebel Trust, created lots of conversation in the very active chat running alongside the presentations and panel discussions (scroll down in this link to find these recordings).  Lots of people also gave their thoughts in the survey monkey sent out afterwards, in response …

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Outdoors is Plan A: Taking Learning Outside During Pandemic Times

We were greatly looking forward to Nancy Striniste’s in-person presentation as our international speaker for the 3rd Early Childhood Outdoors professional gathering last March – but of course her visit to the UK had to be postponed.  Based in Arlington, Virginia (USA), Nancy is an imaginative landscape designer who specialises in creating nature-rich outdoor spaces …

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Teaching in a pandemic – what did we change?

A few weeks ago I enjoyed watching an interview outdoor play enthusiast and preschool teacher Kierna Corr recorded with Kathy Brodie for Early Years TV (in case you don’t already know, a new interview is free to view for a week every Friday evening).  A very interesting thread in Kierna’s conversation was about changes her team in …

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Architecture and Learning in the 1930’s 

I’ve been inspired by Earlham Early Years Centre ever since I visited as part of a Learning through Landscapes team supporting the conference celebrating their newly completed garden in 2003.  The story of how this garden came about, showing vision, courage and a commitment to carrying out what they believed in, was an inspiration in …

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Friluftsliv: Living well with nature

The winter solstice is just around the corner now (10.02 on 21st Dec) – a pivotal day that carries the promise of lengthening days and eventually, the early signs of Spring.  As the official start of Winter though, it in itself provokes us to acknowledge that the winter months are here now.  And before us …

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Designing an effective play area

For this week’s post I’m very pleased to be able to share another of Kathy Brodie’s interviews with people who champion being, playing and learning outdoors for every child – this time from Julie Mountain, long-time Landscapes for Early Childhood friend, former Learning through Landscapes colleague, and passionate advocate for ‘no child left inside’. Julie …

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