Transform Your Outdoor Early Childhood Learning Environment (€19.50)

Reimagine what you can do with your outdoor space

Transforming Your Outdoor Early Learning Environment guides educators, daycare centers, and preschools in creating engaging learning spaces on a limited budget, using natural elements and loose materials that offer children the opportunity for irresistible and immersive exploration.

It provides ideas, inspiration, and benefits for transforming outdoor spaces, along with the basic principles for designing, transforming, and maintaining 11 specific areas for outdoor play.

Transforming your outdoor early learning environment offers an approach that:

– Requires minimal financial resources

– Includes loose parts

– Uses recycled materials and incorporates nature

– Includes spectacular before-and-after photos

– Provides specific design tips and lists of materials

– Each space incorporates a specific concept for babies and young children

– Reveals the learning of action patterns typically found in play areas

Lisa Daly describes how play in each zone fosters children’s skills, development, and learning in the areas of social and emotional development, language and communication, cognitive development, physical development, and the expressive arts, and includes real-life stories of children playing with open-ended materials in each zone to illustrate their learning and development.

Lisa Daly is passionate about transforming early learning to foster deeper, meaningful experiences and connections, innovation, creativity, and reflection. Her professional work focuses on collaborating with educators to change educational approaches and transform learning environments to support children’s identities, inquiry, and engagement. She is the co-author of *Early Learning Theories Made Visible* and the award-winning *Peças Soltas* series (previously published by APEI).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction to Transforming Your Outdoor Early Childhood Education Environment 1
Chapter 1 The What, Why, and How of Transforming Outdoor Learning Spaces 9
Chapter 2 Art Studios 43
Chapter 3 Clay Studios 67
Chapter 4 Sound Gardens 87
Chapter 5 Mud Kitchens 105
Chapter 6 Small Worlds 123
Chapter 7 Construction Zones 143
Chapter 8 Pathways 163
Chapter 9 Gross Motor Zones 181
Chapter 10 Sand Zones 203
Chapter 11 Water Zones 125
Chapter 12 Cozy Spaces and Hiding Places 245
Appendix A: The Process of Being, Doing, and Becoming 263
Appendix B: Evaluate Your Current Outdoor Space 264
Appendix C: Materials and Accessories for Your Outdoor Space 265
Bibliography 269