The benefits of outdoor play aren’t just physical. It allows children to challenge themselves and become appraisers of risk. This, in turn, helps develop cognitive, social and emotional, and self-regulatory skills.
Spending time on the playground is a great opportunity for children to be physically active and engage in various forms of play, as well as develop a variety of foundational social and emotional skills.
Authored by
Authored by:
Hsiu-Wen Yang, Michaelene M. Ostrosky, Paddy Cronin Favazza, Yusuf Akemoğlu, W. Catherine Cheung, Katherine Aronson-Ensign
We may not be able to control the spread of the virus, the changing mandates, or the inequities and social justice issues intensified by the pandemic, but we can control how much our children feel loved by us.
Stepping back from children’s play, rather than always inserting ourselves into it, gives us time to intentionally observe, listen to, and record children as they play.
Authored by
Authored by:
Krystina Tapia, Emma Pickering, Jesse Robert Coffino
Without the toys and supplies commonly found in a classroom, Denise O’Hara’s children relied on nature to spark their imaginations and activities. Through this series of photographs and captions, you’ll see some of their playful creations.
Contact with nature can help mitigate the negative effects of stress. Through nature-based encounters, we can provide children with strategies to use while they are in our care and beyond.
In this piece, author Ron Grady takes us on a journey of one day in the life of a nature-based preschool. He also shares reflections and tips that can apply to any setting.
Teaching Young Children is NAEYC's magazine for anyone who works with preschoolers. Colorful, informative, and easy-to-read, TYC is packed full of teaching ideas, strategies, and tips.
In this column, we put renewed interest in outdoor learning into context by reviewing the past 200 years of ideas and practices in nature-based education for young children.
It is important that educators and researchers pay attention to immigrant children’s experiences and honor and actively incorporate their transnational expertise into early learning settings.
Place-based education uses local cultures, heritage, landscapes, opportunities, and experiences to create a curriculum in which literacy, mathematics, social studies, science, and arts learning occur in the context of place.
