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How To Help Your Students Experience the Benefits of Nature

Playing outdoors helps children learn to appreciate nature, enjoy fresh air, and discover new forms of fun and learning. The benefits of nature play activities and equipment are distinct from typical classroom environments and traditional playgrounds. By exploring nature with hands-on learning and experimental messy play, children develop fine-motor skills and compassion for the living world.

You can encourage this interaction with, and appreciation for, the benefits of nature in a variety of ways:

  1. Creating shared gardens for children to nurture plants
  2. Allowing students to observe and collect insects with the proper equipment in bug hotels and inspection tables
  3. Inspiring messy play with mud kitchens and other hands-on, sensory equipment
  4. Providing the opportunity to learn more about nature with informative posters for internal and external classrooms

Nurturing

Child & Worker Planting in Planter Close Up Hands

One of the key lessons that being around nature provides is how to look after and care for living things. School gardens are a great opportunity for children to learn important skills from an early age.

Letting children care for a variety of vegetables, herbs, and flowers creates a fun community project with a tasty or pretty outcome that they will love come harvest time. By assigning children to one planter section per class and creating a rota for watering the plants, teachers can help children learn independence and responsibility through collaboration.

Any-sized school can build its own shared garden with a wooden planter or a combination garden planter. Simply place it in the corner of your playground and fill it with fertile soil- no digging into your play field required. With Play-Grade high-pressure treated timber, sourced from FSC-approved suppliers, the planters can withstand any outdoor conditions, so your students’ plant projects can grow undisturbed.

With features like customisable signs to label each planter’s contents and beds at various heights, our school garden planters create an accessible space for the nurture of both the plants themselves and children’s curious minds.

Observing

Hands-on learning when nature is involved is always an exciting adventure! By safely interacting with insects with the proper equipment designed to not overly disturb or harm them, children get a unique insight into their local ecosystems.

Combine play with learning with observational equipment like our Bug Hotel and Bug Inspection Table. This messy play equipment is built for children to use under supervision in outdoor lessons and in independent learning. With clear dome windows into the natural habitats of your local insect wildlife, children can learn to identify different bugs and develop a deeper understanding of their lifecycles and movements.

Involved observation of local wildlife is both engaging and educational, allowing children to develop their own passions and interests to environmental science. Showing children ecosystems up close and personal with hands-on learning promotes compassion and appreciation for the natural world in a much more powerful way than simply learning about it in a classroom.

Playing

Put a twist on play by encouraging children to follow their instincts towards mess! Creativity has a space beyond art lessons when schools allow children to use their imaginations on the playground. Mud Kitchens- small or large– are an ideal addition to your playground to encourage this type of play.

The fine-motor skills and creativity involved in playing with a variety of materials are essential to development for young children. The skills involved in messy play include socialisation, language development, confidence, and imagination.

By engaging with the world around them through play, combining different materials in a bespoke play sink, children have endless opportunities for learning. Whether they’re making mud pies or potions, children can explore and learn while having fun in nature.

Learning

Bringing learning to the playground expands the potential of education, making learning fun! By providing educational resources all around the school, children can choose what they would like to engage with. This turns learning into their decision and helps them understand and develop their own independent interests.

We recommend introducing a range of posters across your playground- especially in outdoor classrooms, nature trails, or school gardens. With large text and high-resolution images on waterproof, fade-resistant laminate, our nature learning posters are suitable for any environment and appropriate for any age.

Posters can act as reference guide to learning about local ecosystems. Our range includes information about British treespond lifewild flowers, and even farm animals. Every child has different interests that should be nurtured in every aspect of school life. By providing access to information on local plants to children from a young age, you could inspire a future botanist or biologist that otherwise may not have discovered their passion.

Our lifecycle posters are especially powerful learning tools for teachers in outdoor lessons for key stage 2 children. With an outdoor poster displaying the lifecycle or a dandelion or ladybird for example, children can go out and identify real plants and insects at different stages in their cycle- making learning practical as well as fun!

Does your Playground Offer the Benefits of Nature to your Students?

You can introduce nature to children’s’ worlds in many ways, all of which inspire different aspects of development and learning. Whether you want to inspire your students through play, hands-on experience, or research, we have you covered.

Explore our nature play equipment in our online supply store to build your ideal outdoor zone. You can also get in touch with our team to discuss your options for equipment installation with the handy form on our contact page.