“Will the children be kindergarten ready if they spend their days playing outside?”

As educators, we are often asked about kindergarten readiness by nervous parents who want to give their children the best possible start in life.

It’s important for parents—and educators—to understand that there are endless opportunities for deep learning when children are connected to nature. Young children learn primarily through their senses. The natural world—with its stimulating and constantly changing elements—provides the ultimate sensory learning environment.

When children explore the world through sensory play, they are actively building new neural pathways, which is crucial for brain development. When we slow down enough to observe this process, it’s easy to see the learning that takes place, and the social skills that are being developed, as the children collaborate on projects in the great outdoors.

On an unusually warm day in May, the boys in our program are busy building a large castle in the sandbox. This may look like nothing more than sandbox play, but there’s some deep learning going on here as our castle architects lay the foundation for future academic success.

“We should build a moat!” declares Joshua.

“Yeah, a moat!” agrees the gang. “We definitely need a moat!”

With these words, the digging begins. Before long, the castle builders decide that it’s time to add water to the moat. We have plenty of buckets at our center, but today most of the buckets are already in use.

Looking around for a way to transport the water from the pump to the sandbox, the boys settle on a nearby piece of fabric from one of their forts.

We’re all hot, tired and likely a little dehydrated at this point. A glance at the clock tells me that it’s almost closing time. But who am I to redirect the boys by pointing out the empty bucket next to the fence?

I watch as the boys carefully stretch the material out and center it beneath the pump spigot to catch as much water as they can. Asa begins pumping and, to my astonishment, the fabric holds the water without any leakage.

WHAT in the world?  I’m marveling at this unexpected development when it occurs to me that the cloth I’d purchased from the resale shop is actually a waterproof fabric used in hospital settings.

When I ask the boys if they were aware that the fabric was waterproof when they grabbed it, they respond with a question of their own: “What does waterproof mean?”

I try to explain that waterproof means that the water will not flow through the fabric. But there are times for discussion and times for action—and the boys are already focused on the next step in their plan.

First, they gather the corners of the cloth, taking care to keep the water from gushing out the sides. Then they make their way gingerly across the yard to the sandbox and carefully place the fabric in the moat.

I realize at this point that the boys had deliberately ruled out the use of buckets because they needed a flexible, waterproof liner for their castle moat.

They had assumed that the fabric they chose would hold water and, at the same time, conform to the shape of the moat. Wow! They were way ahead of me!

The boys did eventually make multiple trips to the pump to fill some buckets and add more water to the moat. But they knew that the bucket wasn’t the best tool for the initial phase of moat construction. Silly me!

This is just another example of the importance of giving young children sufficient time to engage in deep play and problem-solving (without any interference from those of us who think we have all of the answers), as well as the importance of loose parts in creative play.

Look at the delight on their faces! Okay, so the castle architect on the far right in the photo below seems to be grimacing at the weight of the load, but the other two look pretty thrilled with the success of their mission!

When we look at children playing in sand, what are WE missing? They are busy designing, creating, collaborating and communicating. They are adding and subtracting, working with shapes and molds and inclines and declines. They are adding water to change the nature of their building material. They are using spatial awareness and math and science vocabulary. They are theorizing, hypothesizing and collecting data. They are engineering and deepening their knowledge—all while playing in a box of sand!

This is the ultimate in STEM learning. Give them as much time as they need. Let them play. Add fabric to your play centers. You never know where their outdoor play will lead them—and what YOU may learn in the process!

” Hey guys! Look over here! My magnet sticks to the bike!”

On this warm November morning, our magnetic wands have brought STEM learning to our outdoor classroom. By leaving the other magnetic materials behind, I am hoping to encourage the children to harness their curiosity and creativity for other forms of magnetic exploration. Opportunities like this allow children to learn independently, as well as collectively, as they explore on their own and then share what they have discovered with their fellow magnetic explorers.

This morning’s investigation introduces the children to scientific methods such as forming hypotheses, setting up experiments to test out their hypotheses, analyzing data and recording results. We have math exploration as they learn about spatial awareness, as well as math vocabulary building as they begin to understand and label concepts such as location and ordinal positioning—all in a morning of play with friends.

“Oh, wait! It sticks on the red part, but not on the black seat,” exclaims Harrison.

As the children race over to view Harrison’s latest discovery, I note with satisfaction that they have found their own way on this morning of STEM exploration.

“Why won’t it stick on the black seat, Harrison?” I ask.

“Because it’s not metal,” Harrison shares with the group.

“It’s not metal!” the other children repeat in a chorus of little voices. We are in that modeling stage of language this month. A comment made by one child is repeated by every child, like a group of enthusiastic parrots. This behavior has been making me a bit crazy lately. But, at this moment, I am grateful.

“Wait! This part is black but my magnet sticks here.” Harrison is thinking out loud, and his comment is met with silence as the other children test out his observation and come to the same conclusion.

“Wow, Harrison, I am confused. Why does your magnet stick on the black part there but not on the black seat or the black tires?” I ask.

“This black line is metal,” Harrison shares. “It is black metal.”

The other children parrot his response as the learning continues: “Yes! It is metal—black metal!”

Harrison continues to educate his peers. “The red part of the bike is metal and this black strip here is metal. The tires and the seat are not metal.”

Soon, the magnetic exploration moves to the swings, which leads to another deep dive into STEM learning as the children use their wands to determine which parts of the swingset are magnetic and which are non-magnetic. It is also a great opportunity for us to document our research and meet more Illinois early learning benchmark standards.

We use red and green tape to document our results. Magnetic surfaces are marked with green tape (go) and non-magnetic surfaces are marked with red tape (stop).

We could also record our findings on a clipboard, but this is a fun and visual way to document our data—and it is easier for the children to understand than checkmarks on a piece of paper.

This group doesn’t read yet—and drawing pictures would have slowed down the learning process. If you happen to have an artistic child who loves charts, this is a dream day for them. Make this child your research assistant!

I love it when children learn while moving, playing and sharing with friends.

Experimenting with magnets encourages children to learn by exploring, observing and figuring out how things work. A longer period of time for discovery gives our students more opportunities to learn. I look over at the stump circle and see Eleanor quietly working her way through a solitary study of magnetic fields. Eleanor is deep in concentration as she studies and researches, collecting data and reanalyzing the magnetic poles and the attraction of the multiple magnetic wands.

“It’s called a magnetic field,” I explain. Eleanor is working through her understanding and doesn’t look up from her investigation. I watch her speculate her way through different scenarios and then I try again.

“It’s invisible!” I whisper, and Eleanor’s head pops up.

“Who doesn’t love invisible?”  I continue to whisper: “It’s that invisible power called a magnetic field that is making your magnets push or pull each other. I love invisible.”

“It’s magic!” chirps Eleanor. “I can feel it pulling me!”

Eleanor smiles as she shares her understanding with me. It never gets old for me to observe the excitement and wonder that goes hand in hand with little brains making new connections and discoveries.

The next time you head outdoors with your students, grab the magnetic wands and let the invisible magic of magnetism lead them to a new understanding of magnetic forces and fields. If you’ve gone virtual this new year, magnetic play is a great way to get your little learners to venture out into their own backyards to get some fresh air and learn about magnetism through play.

Stay safe, my friends!

“It works! The water is coming out!” Rokia cannot contain her excitement as the discovery of a full rain barrel adds a new avenue of discovery and learning for our week.

“How did you do that? Can I have a turn? Get a bucket!” The excitement builds as so many little brains begin to figure out what is happening here. We have hypotheses, theories and observation humming away. There is nothing like water to bring a group of children together for a day of play and learning that can help you meet your curriculum goals.

As the United States begins to open up with precautions in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19, there are opportunities to literally change the landscape of early childhood education by spending more time in outdoor spaces.

The best place for our children as we navigate this “new normal” is in nature. Studies show that sunlight, higher temperatures and humidity are detrimental to the survival of the coronavirus.

We also know that exposure to dirt helps young children develop healthy microbiomes and strong immune systems. Outdoor activities make social distancing easier—and research suggests that outdoor learning can deliver many other benefits, from boosting mood and increasing concentration to reducing stress.

You can meet many important early learning standards easily with outdoor play. And once you take your curriculum outdoors, you may never want to head back inside!

It’s important for anyone working with young children to understand the enormous potential for learning and brain development that exists when children are connected to nature. As children actively use their senses to explore the natural world, they are forging new neural connections and strengthening neural pathways through sensory play.

In short, outdoors is where our children need to be—and setting up an outdoor classroom is easier than you think. You don’ t even need to have a natural setting.

Water is a great place to start because we want the children in our care to wash their hands A LOT during the pandemic—and we can set up water play just about anywhere.

Incorporating water into our daily play with a rain barrel was one of the smartest things I ever did. We love using rain barrels for scientific exploration and discovery, as well as teaching children how to be good stewards of the earth’s limited resources. Many cities give away rain barrels for free to promote water conservation. If your city doesn’t have a rain barrel program, you can purchase a rain barrel for $50-$150 or make your own from a plastic trash can with a lid.

The children love to use the spigot on our rain barrel to explore the concept of flowing water and control the water’s flow. Let me tell you, being in control of something so powerful is a pretty powerful experience in its own right!

The communication and social-emotional skills that develop during this outdoor activity are worth their weight in gold. If your building has a downspout or an outdoor water source, that may be where you place your rain barrel. During very hot, dry summers, we sometimes have to resort to filling the rain barrel with our garden hose. By taking the time to think about these issues, you will help ensure the success of your own rain-barrel adventures.

We are also big proponents of tubs for water play. We use everything from big plastic tubs to utility tubs from auto stores to bus pans from restaurant supply stores to commercial school-supply tubs. This summer, we are adding soap bubbles to the buckets to encourage play and kill germs in a calm, not-in-your-face-scary-virus way. Doing this in front of the students will be a whole science and math lab in itself as they discuss the addition of ingredients, the change in matter, the chemical reaction that takes place and the change in physical properties. So, yes, grab those standards! This is the hands-on learning that we love—all while keeping our children safe from germs!

We were fortunate to have a handyman in our lives with the vision and skill to create a working pump. We buried a short, wide rain barrel and connected it to the farmhand pump. If you’d like to give this a try, you can get the step-by-step directions here. This pump has added hours and hours to our investigations and play. We absolutely LOVE our pump, and it is one of the most popular additions to our outdoor classroom. Many an hour has been spent here learning about cause and effect as the children see “what happens if….” Trust me, they have investigated the craziest ideas that adults just wouldn’t conceive of!

“Eve, come see!  Look what’s crawling under the bridge!” Jamison has discovered a daddy longlegs out for a morning stroll in our rain garden. Many cities and towns across the U.S. are beginning to award grants for rain gardens. We took advantage of our local grant program and created a rain garden filled with native pollinating plants and a dry creek that gifts us with insects, an occasional toad or two, and plenty of opportunities for exploration, observation and investigation.

Last summer, we added a mister connected to a simple garden hose to our tree. With pools closed during the pandemic, this mister (which we ordered from Amazon) is a great alternative that you can take advantage of without great expense or worries about water safety. We supplement the mister with big tubs of water and plenty of buckets and spray bottles. Heavy buckets of water and spray bottles are great resources for building strong arms, wrists and fingers for future pencil gripping. Bring in measuring cups, measuring spoons, tall containers and short wide containers and you have set your students up for outdoor learning activities that will foster the development of predicting, data analysis, probability and geometry skills.

It won’t take the children long to figure out that the mister will afford them many opportunities for water collection. This, in turn, will encourage pouring and measuring and experimenting with volume. Nearby plants, flowers, rocks, shells and other loose parts will add to the value of the play. When children make dandelion soup or rock salad, they are combining, collaborating, creating and imagining. It’s all there for us to document. They don’t need worksheets, they need play!

As we navigate our way around the pandemic, maybe we need to return to the roots of early childhood education by taking a page from the playbook of the German educator and nature lover Friedrich Froebel, who founded the first kindergarten (which translates literally to “children’s garden”). Froebel’s original kindergarten model in 1837 emphasized time and opportunities for children to connect with natural materials in a garden for play. Maybe this is what kindergarten could and should emulate as we reimagine early childhood education this year.

All of the activities that you need to meet your math and science standards are awaiting you in the garden. Head outside and lay the foundation for math and science success with a developmentally appropriate day of nature play.

Let’s take back what early education could look like in America. Join me!

So, teaching data analysis to young children seems completely contradictory to me.  How do we look at data sets and make sense of it?

Young children need to collect data that is meaningful to them.  This can be in the form of scientific inquiry such as; how many sprinkler days did we have this summer?   or, what is everyone’s favorite kind of juice? The data can then be collected and categorized into data sets.  Usually, we want to explore ideas that yield manageable data sets for young children (2 – 3 sets, ideally).  In the case of favorite juices, children may say orange, apple, grape and possibly one other.

You should tally their responses by using visual cues that can be read by pre-readers. You might draw three glasses on the top of the tag board with one filled with orange, one filled with yellow and one filled with purple.  The colors will visually represent the juice and will make sense to the children.

Under each choice, the children can write their names to represent their choice, or if they are not ready to write, you could put their photos under their choices.  You have now created a usable data set that is analyzed by the children.  The analysis should be readily seen and understood by the children.  You can ask questions of the data, for example; Which juice is the favorite amongst our group?  Which juice is the least favorite?  How many children chose each kind? etc.

Next week we will continue looking at data analysis and the young child.