Month: May 2019

“Together we can help children grow”

Often a child’s favourite place to be is in the back garden, whether this is kicking a ball around playing football or paddling around in the swimming pool – the activities available are endless!

In addition to the fun playing, children love to grow plants and with the warmer months approaching – National Children’s Gardening Week arrives!

National Children’s Gardening Week encourages children to take part in gardening including in school and aims to provide activities and resources for families and schools around children’s gardening.

The earth has been impacted hugely with our actions such as pollution, waste, and recycling and is damaging the environment on a daily basis, so we need to try and reverse this and look after it.

According to the National Trust, children aren’t playing outside as much as previous generations, spending 17 hours each week watching television and 20 hours online – however, children being stuck inside can disconnect children from the natural world.

The benefits provided from children gardening include improvements in physical health, mental well-being, social skills and behaviour – further information can be found on their website

In light of National Children’s Gardening Week, we have launched two BRAND NEW Viewing Planters!

These products allow children to plant their own seeds and watch their plants transform, observing how the root systems grow and even see the small insects and creepy crawlies bust at work! Click here to check out our new Viewing Planters

Learning outdoors offers more benefits than the obvious! Teachers report some great benefits such as improvement to children’s behaviours and the class become excited to learn and interact more!

When adults think back to their happiest moments, 9 times out of 10, playing outdoors is a fond memory.

Outdoor classroom day is a campaign aimed to encourage children to play and learn outdoors – it may be a case of encouraging teachers to take learning outdoor for the first time or if this is something that is already being regularly done, take a day to celebrate the opportunity they have by being able to provide this resource – even inspire other neighbouring schools to get involved!

In 2018 over 3.5 million children took part in outdoor classroom day world-wide with more than 550,000 of those were in the UK & Ireland.

Outside of school, less and less children are spending time outdoors and games consoles and TV seem to be taking over – there are many reasons for this but playing outdoors plays a vital part to a child’s development.

Learning and playing outdoors encourages the development of self-awareness, confidence and self-esteem, develops social and communicative skills and provides positive health benefits – both physically and mentally. It also supports and assists fundamental movement skills and many many more…

In addition to this playing and learning outside also helps children to understand and respect nature, the environment and the interdependence of humans, animals, plants, and lifecycle.

We fully support Outdoor Classroom Day as we understand the benefits outdoor learning brings – in light of this, we currently have a selection of savings on our shelters – you can view these here

If you would like to get involved please visit https://outdoorclassroomday.org.uk/ – they have information on how to get involved and all the resources required!