Nursery World - Enabling Environments: Outdoors

In the final part of her four-part series on the 7Cs approach to
planning the outdoor play space, Julie Mountain looks at Change and
Chance.

Pioneered by a landscape research team at the University of British Columbia, 7Cs is a strategy that can inform the design of early childhood outdoor spaces. So far in this series, I have explored what 7Cs looks like in practice by examining how the Character of a space influences its use and why Clarity is important, how Context and Connectivity enrich outdoor play, and the significance of Challenge outdoors (see the information column at the end of this piece). I deliberately left Change and Chance until last.

For me, these two pieces of the 7Cs jigsaw truly encapsulate the sheer joy of what it means to be very young and to be playing outdoors. As we grow older, life becomes more regimented, more organised and more prepared. Opportunities to react to unexpected events become rarer - because most things that happen to us are more or less anticipated. And, of course, we play outdoors less as adults.

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