Features

Enabling Environments: Collections - Follow the leader

The outdoors offers opportunities to get creative with role play.
Nicole Weinstein suggests how practitioners might provide resources to
support, and build on, children's natural interests.

The outdoors enables children to experience role play on a much larger, noisier and messier scale than they would otherwise be able to. Big, sensory fun takes place when children play car washes, become fire-fighters with hoses or set up construction sites in sand pits.

Stages or outdoor theatres encourage children to develop their creativity through drama, dance and impromptu talent contests. Props such as hats, masks, dressing-up clothes, CD players, microphones and instruments will further extend their play.

Physical play in the form of superheroes is great for both co-ordination and working out moral values. Practitioners should also offer children a wide range of open-ended resources like blocks, large cardboard boxes, and large pieces of material and tarpaulins to help develop their thinking and creative skills.

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