Nature-based education or outdoor learning plays a vital role in making children active and decreasing their sedentary lifestyle, which can lead to numerous health issues in the future. Researcher Frances Ming Kuo highlighted the importance of exposing toddlers to nature with a term called “Vit. G” (G for “green”), which gives significance to nature’s role in providing a healthy life. Nature-based learning has a very calming effect on the upbringing of any child’s psychology. Even looking at the picture of nature has a positive impact on the minds of the children.
Today’s preschool classrooms, like playschools in Gurgaon often prioritize scripted lessons and questionable metrics, inadvertently undervaluing a child’s natural intelligence and potentially overtaxing their developing brains. This focus on structured academics comes at the expense of crucial experiences, like regular exposure to nature, which is vital for fostering curiosity, creativity, and a healthy sense of wonder in young children. A more balanced approach, incorporating the natural world into early learning, would better nurture a child’s overall development.
The Positive Impact of Nature in Early Years
Nature and outdoor learning have numerous effects on the brains of our little ones. Children find it exciting, and it helps their overall growth. It is a fact a creche near me in any city has less space, and hence playschools in Gurgaon or any other metro cities fail to give this exposure to nature to their children. Let’s list out some of the key benefits of nature on the mind and body of our babies are listed below:
- Encourages Creativity: Learning involving outdoor activities helps toddlers learn to be creative in their lives. They learn through role play in the garden of their school. Collecting several raw materials in the field allows them to think about new things and encourages creativity. It enables them to invent, create, and imagine with natural or raw materials like wood, sticks, stones, sand, mud, pebbles, leaves, rocks, water, and snow.
- Holistic Development: Nature affects the mind, body, emotions, and social skills during the early years. It helps them learn new skills and knowledge essential for their everyday lives, allowing them to gain new knowledge and skills. Learning through nature shows children’s physical, social, and cognitive development. Children are free to play, explore, and object for discovery and creative use of play enhancement.
- Reduces Stress: Nature has a healing property that helps you get calmer and stress-free. Research shows that simply spending a short time with nature helps reduce pulse rate and cortisol levels, enhancing parasympathetic nervous activity. Nature also allows toddlers to improve their concentration and attention. Studies prove that students who spend time outdoors for recreational and learning purposes have less primary students’ stress and mood improvement.
- Improves Confidence: Outdoor-based learning also helps them explore social-emotional development or skills that allow them to be confident around people. Outdoor play enables children to undergo exploratory and free-flow play. Such activities give self-confidence and efficacy in adolescents.
- Empathy with Nature: Playing in the school’s garden or park teaches children empathy. It teaches children to be compassionate not only with nature but also with humans. Exposure to nature increases your children’s care, love and respect for nature, ultimately leading to sustainable behaviour and connection with nature.
Benefits of Outdoor Learning in Early Years
Early introduction to nature comes with many benefits that leave an ever-lasting impact on the children’s physical, mental, and social well-being. At IPSAA, we promote play-based learning integrating some sort of feasible outdoor learning.
Outdoor activities increase the child’s appetite and, hence, sleep quality. The following are the advantages of outdoor activities:
- Good Health: Nature enriches humans’ microbiomes, protecting their bodies against allergy and inflammatory disorders and helping promote immune balance. Early introduction to nature makes them physically active and helps them avoid a sedentary lifestyle by just sitting on the couch and watching TV. Good health also enhances joy and satisfaction. It is also crucial for both child and teacher to get fresh in the middle of a classroom setting. It helps the children to get free space and freedom to express feelings. By doing this, their moods are uplifted automatically, which motivates them to learn other subjects like maths, science, English, etc. quickly.
- Enhances Social and Communication Skills: By introducing the freedom to explore the field and object to discover new things, you can help children develop their social and communication skills, which our IPSAA helps children do efficiently. Moreover, introducing nature during the early years helps students succeed in the future because of good attention, focus, and social behaviour. It also encourages children to show good behavioural characteristics in their future by less stress, anxiety, and depression. Playing in a natural setting helps children learn to work as a team, improving their sense of responsibility, competence, and social-emotional skills.
- Multimodal Hands-on Learning Opportunity: Nature enhances creativity and hands-on learning, as well as imaginative role-playing by soil digging and using sense to taste and observe things like smelling and tasting veggies and berries in the field. It encourages physical as well as practical learning. Students can also involve themselves in creating arts and crafts using natural materials, which increases creativity.
- Teachers and Mediators: Theteacher has a vital role in improving and encouraging the child’s activities. The teachers at IPSAA and playschools in Gurgaon act as facilitators to help children learn and apply in their day-to-day lives. They must also look after the children’s safety and indirectly guide them. It can be challenging for them sometimes to maintain the balance of allowing or restricting them, e.g. saying not to pick flowers or step on plants.
- Organisation of Outdoor Learning: This plays a crucial role in implementing this overall scenario. A teacher has to organise everything well in advance to make sure children are not distracted from using nature. But before organising any such event, the following points must be considered:
- Space and equipment
- Weather conditions
- Parents role in encouraging outdoor activities (Read IPSAA post for some help (Creative Activities to Boost Your Child’s Imagination at Home)
- Positive relationship with the community
- Use of digital devices
Nature-Based / Outdoor Activities
Many activities help children learn independence, self-confidence, social skills, and conversation skills, increasing their attention span and encouraging them to ask more in-depth questions. Learning through nature enhances pre-academic, cognitive, linguistic and motor skills by inspiring children’s mental, constructive and sociodramatic play. Exposure to nature improves children’s eyesight by reducing near-sightedness (myopia).
- Soil digging
- Paint with water
- Looking at the sky
- Sand and mud play
- Science Exploration
- Running and playing
- Listening to different sounds of nature
- Manipulate water flow with movable stones.
- Mini gardening is encouraged by IPSAA as well
- Water play (creates multi-sensory play opportunity)
- Collecting sticks or stones, etc, for the art and craft of the classroom
👉 Learn About the IMPACT OF STORIES on Children
Six Benefits of Natural-Based Learning in Early Childhood
Natural or outdoor-based activities have a positive impact on the health of children. It reduces the risk of obesity, eye problems, cardiovascular diseases because of being active and running, and depression.
- Increased Psychological Development
- Enhanced Academic Performance
- Lifts Child’s Physical Health
- Improves Social Development and Fosters Social Harmony
- Inculcate a Sense of Responsibility and Belonging
- Encourages Mental and Emotional well-being
Nurturing Young Minds Through Nature at IPSAA
IPSAA encourages students to learn and play in the garden for their overall physical, cognitive, and social well-being.
IPSAA centres like playschools in Gurgaon help its children to be creative and focus on their problem-solving skills and intellectual development. A study in the US shows that schools that use outdoor activities like ours are showing significant improvement in subjects like science, language arts, social studies, and maths. The research also indicates that natural-based learning decreases Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children as young as 5 years. Richard Louv uses the term “nature-deficit disorder’ to highlight the deficit of having limited exposure to the natural environment in his book ‘The Last Child in the Woods’.
If you are searching for a creche near me, IPSAA can be an answer. Equipped with a progressive educational approach and modern learning tools, IPSAA sets the perfect environment for your little one. We encourage excellent spaces by organising mini-gardening activities. Here, they learn about the plant sowing process and the watering process. These activities give them insight into caring and showing respect for nature.
We also encourage experiential learning by making our children collect raw materials from the garden and use them for their arts and crafts. Through this, they develop and harness their creativity apart from classroom learning.
✔️ BOOST THE CREATIVITY OF YOUR CHILDREN AT HOME
That is why we guarantee comprehensive learning for our students. IPSAA inspires students to be curious and creative by introducing outdoor and inquiry-based learning. We support Inquiry-based learning by encouraging our children to explore or ask questions to tackle real-world problems. It fosters problem-solving activities, critical activities, and curiosity about real-world objects.
Join us at IPSAA right now to get the benefits of nature-based learning in early childhood!