The summer is upon us and children are home from school. Parents are scrambling about trying to figure out how to entertain their child/children. In the sentiment of “The Wizard of Oz”, the answer was there all the time. Rather than clicking your heels three times, you just need to open the door of your home and let them enjoy the great outdoors.
Whether it is in your very own back yard, the local park or the playground at your child’s preschool/daycare, the outdoors is the place for children to flourish not only physically but academically as well. Development of fine and gross motor skills along with cardiovascular endurance can be most effectively learned through outdoor play. It can be a pleasurable way to change the culture of excessive TV and computer use – a “back to basics” approach.
What better way to learn about the world around us than to experience it via our senses? Close your eyes for a moment and think about the smell of rain after a storm. Remember being a child and opening your mouth to taste the raindrops? What was it like as a child to see lightning? Was it coming from the ground up or the sky down? How calming was the sound of the rain? How many puddles did you splash through? Awakening and cultivating natural curiosity sets the tone for engaging in the educational experience at any age revolving around a variety of subject matter primarily science followed by math and most certainly language. All of that it in just a couple of minutes of outdoor play.
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Once Upon A Time when I was a child the best part of my day was going to the park and experiencing the great outdoors – running, rolling, climbing and swinging. Let’s let children be children.
