Apr 21, 2020 | Art & Music Outdoors, Early Years Outdoors, Nature Play & Learning
I’m fortunate enough to live in a wee town where there are a number of different walks I can do from my house. Most of the time, I’ll confess, I’m busy playing Wizards Unite. Today, being bored of this game, I thought I’d go in search of gold....
Jan 20, 2019 | Early Years Outdoors, Nature Play & Learning
This is a guest post by Lesley McLaren, Admin Assistant at Creative STAR. She wrote during a very snowy winter. We are waiting for another decent fall of snow and hope this blog post will inspire you to get out and play when it happens. We had a huge amount of snow...
Jun 3, 2018 | Community Involvement, Nature Play & Learning
I love visiting different places for children to play. One space I’ve never blogged about has been backyards. Children can spend a lot of time in their garden or backyard and so making this a play-friendly space is a wonderful thing to do. This week I’ve...
Sep 2, 2017 | Early Years Outdoors, Nature Play & Learning
In this blog post, I had the opportunity to interview Zilvinas Karpis, who founded the first outdoor nursery in Lithuania. As with other European countries, there is increased focus and interest in such approaches. There is lots of evidence that points to the...
Jun 4, 2016 | Early Years Outdoors, Nature Play & Learning
To find a seashell is to discover a world of imagination – Michelle Held One of the best things about going to the sea can be finding shells. Some beaches, especially coral ones are littered with a myriad of shells. Others, it is more of a challenge to find even...
May 23, 2016 | Art & Music Outdoors, Gardening, Nature Play & Learning, Science Outdoors
Recently I saw a blog post about creating natural watercolour paint from fresh flowers. With lots of flowers appearing now spring is here, I thought it would be a timely opportunity to have a go at this myself – a practice run before trialling on a group of...
Feb 26, 2016 | Art & Music Outdoors, Community Involvement, Nature Play & Learning
Back in 2102 I blogged about the sand dog sculpture below. I was genuinely delighted at the ingenuity of the person who was creating a dog from a small bag of sand. In the years that followed I’ve received numerous enquiries from people about whether these dogs...
Jan 25, 2016 | Nature Play & Learning, Personal & Holidays
I am just finishing reading David Sobel’s fascinating book Childhood and Nature: Design Principles for Educators. This past weekend, we took a trip as a family to Bennachie Nature Centre in Aberdeenshire and I couldn’t help viewing the outing through my new “design...
Sep 27, 2015 | Gardening, Nature Play & Learning, Technologies
Every autumn or spring, I like to try something new or different to make with foraged or grown fruit and berries. I’ve tried making rosehip syrup which was lovely. This year I managed to be sufficiently organised to try my hand at making a fruit leather. You can...
Jul 7, 2015 | Developing School Grounds & Outdoor Spaces, Nature Play & Learning
Big boulders are an unsung resource. Children love to play on them. Every boulder tells the story of the Planet Earth and how it has come to be like it is. Very often there will be one or two large boulders in a playground. Yet as a learning resource these are largely...
May 14, 2015 | Early Years Outdoors, Gardening, Nature Play & Learning
I have never been a big fan of the commercial flower presses. They are fiddly to use, a fixed shape and usually too small at that. Normally I just press flowers between by inserting them between kitchen roll and sticking them inside a big heavy book. This is fine at...
Oct 12, 2014 | Art & Music Outdoors, Early Years Outdoors, Nature Play & Learning, RME Outdoors
Recently I was visiting the The Lost Gardens of Heligan. In the entrance, was the beautiful hanging decoration. Upon closer inspection, it contained a range of autumn finds: Beside the hanging decoration was a notice which asked visitors to collect the colours of...
Jul 12, 2014 | Art & Music Outdoors, Early Years Outdoors, Maths Outdoors, Nature Play & Learning
It’s hard not to be inspired by pebbles. You pick them up, you look at them and they speak silently to you in ways that words can’t describe. They are inexplicably powerful. Sometimes you pick one up, hold it and carry it with you for a while on your walk....
Feb 8, 2014 | Developing School Grounds & Outdoor Spaces, Early Years Outdoors, Nature Play & Learning
One of the main reasons to visit a beach or greenspace site is to have different experiences to those at school or nursery. What has particularly interested me, has been the ways in which the environment itself has provided innate differences but also how the...
Jan 11, 2014 | Early Years Outdoors, Health & Wellbeing, Nature Play & Learning
My beliefs and principles are often tested by outdoor experiences. I would like to be able to tell you that by now, I’ve got the systems sussed and my approach sorted. Only it doesn’t seem to work like that. Every group of children is different. Every...
Jan 7, 2014 | Maths Outdoors, Nature Play & Learning
Back in the Seventies, one of the most popular games which took the UK by storm was Mastermind. It was aimed at 8yrs olds and upwards. It’s a form of code cracking where you have to work out the hidden line of coloured pegs. It was developed from a traditional...
Nov 27, 2013 | Early Years Outdoors, Nature Play & Learning
We tend not to associate urban areas with wildspace. Places where children have the opportunity to connect with nature in their own way. Yet in the heart of Aberdeen lies a tiny beach which does just that. It is becoming quietly famous in its own way because it...
Oct 12, 2013 | Nature Play & Learning, Science Outdoors
Autumn is really here. The conkers have been gathered. The leaves made into art work. The rosehips turned into syrup. And now the berries have been threaded onto wire. This was all a bit of an investigation which was prompted by an activity I ran in one of the Wee...
Aug 27, 2013 | Early Years Outdoors, Nature Play & Learning
One of the best things about the summer is how quickly everything grows. In long grass, there are lots of different grasses and wild flowers to be found. Not only is this good for minibeasts and other wildlife, there are also many traditional games and past times...
Jul 10, 2013 | Early Years Outdoors, Maths Outdoors, Nature Play & Learning
We are all encouraged to work out our environmental footprint, but have you ever considered your impact on daisies? Luckily they are tough little flowers that seem to withstand people treading on them. A nice maths activity is to find out how many daisies you can...
